[Llarry]

By the mid-1960s, the flying boat (seaplane without landing gear) was on its last legs in the U.S. Navy. It had gotten a temporary reprieve from involvement in the Vietnam war, where USN patrol aircraft monitored the waters off South Vietnam for arms shipments coming in from the north.

By then, the Navy was down to three seaplane patrol squadrons; two at the Naval Air Station North Island, Coronado, California and one at the Naval Station Sangley Point, Philippines. From Sangley Point it was a relatively easy transit to Vietnamese waters and Sangley was home to all three patrol aircraft then in USN service: the Martin SP-5B Marlin flying boat, the Lockheed SP-2H Neptune and the Lockheed P-3A and P-3B Orion, which was rapidly replacing the other two types in service. Sangley was crowded with those aircraft as the war expanded, and also was home to a small U.S. Coast Guard unit with Grumman HU-16E Albatross amphibian seaplanes.

I mostly had other priorities like school etc., but as an aviation geek still had time to hang out at the seaplane ramp a few times and watch the crews launch or beach the big SP-5B Marlin flying boats. It was a manpower-intensive operation: the aircraft taxies up, a whaleboat or two tug the beaching gear out to the aircraft and attach it, then attach a cable to pull the SP-5B out of the water up the ramp.

For a short period about this time, Sangley was visited by Royal New Zealand Air Force Short Sunderland flying boats. The Sunderland was an old design and was almost as big as the SP-5B but had four smaller piston engines; the SP-5B had two big R-3350 engines of 3,000 hp each.