A relatively light airframe (for a flying boat), ie no flaps, fabric covered trailing edges. Engines are similar to the DC-3 family, again not that heavy or powerful for the size of airplane but that won’t be a problem with miles of (wet) runway. The lower powered engines means a relatively low fuel consumption. Combine all this with a big wing to store loads of fuel and away you go. I’ll happily look up some numbers but that will have to wait till I get home to my books.
Catalina (PBY-5A):
- Empty weight 20,910 lbs / max TO weight 35,420 lbs
- Fuel capacity 1495 US gallons with self sealing tanks, 1750 US gallons without self sealing liner.
- Cruise speed 125 mph
- Range 2520 mi
DC-3A:
- Empty weight 16,865 lbs / max TO weight 25,199 lbs
- Fuel capacity 822 US gallons
- Cruise speed 207 mph
- Range 1500 mi
You can see from these figures that with the same engines, the PBY is somewhat heavier (but this is for the amphibious version, the PBY-4 weighed in at 24,813 lbs gross and the earlier ones were less than that) but even with the self-sealing tanks has almost double the fuel capacity. If you take an earlier non-amphibious PBY you've got 10,000 lbs less weight to carry but if you use the non-self-sealing tanks you've got 1750 US gallons of fuel on board. That will go a long way if you use it conservatively. The PBY-5A range and cruise speed gives you an endurance of over 20 hours, but I don't know if that includes reserves or leads to empty tanks. Roscoe Creed's 'PBY The Catalina Flying Boat' quotes a patrol range of 2860 miles for a non-amphibious PBY-5 and I assume that this includes reserves and is based on a normal cruising power setting, not a long range power setting.
Last edited by Jhieminga; 30th Oct 2017 at 20:34.
Reason: Added numbers