Originally Posted by
treadigraph
Pan Am definitely out of the flying boat boat business a decade before then and id think Aquila were the only passenger operator in the UK at that point. Big Short flying boat painted up for a film maybe?
No definitely a different design of boat to one of the Shorts types which, as I said, were all across the other side of the water.
Course I was only 7 years old then (you weren't even born) so although I remember some of the detail like how the announcer on the tour boat said it was an 'American' flying boat I don't remember it all.
I believe there was a sort of 'control tower' on one of the dock piers but whether that's still there I don't know, I haven't been on Southampton Water since about 1990 when Plesseys kindly took some of us controllers across to Cowes (once Cowes West airfield but by then the Plessey factory) on the hydrofoil to look at the then new Watchman radar which we were getting at Farnborough.