First off, my first attempt at using this column to do a little fundraising activity is doing fairly well. All the month of August I am donating all proceeds from Amazon and Kindle sales of my book “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” to the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, not only because of the scary outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, but because they’re just good eggs all around at that outfit.
First off, my first attempt at using this column to do a little fundraising activity is doing fairly well. All the month of August I am donating all proceeds from Amazon and Kindle sales of my book “Mysterious Island: Catalina,” to the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, not only because of the scary outbreak of Ebola in West Africa, but because they’re just good eggs all around at that outfit.
In dollar terms, Amazon and Kindle take about half of the purchase price of the book and right now we are up to $88.47 with about half the month of August left to go. In full disclosure, I am not a registered charity or 501(c)(3), so this won’t be tax deductible.
Secondly, if you happen to be in the Torrance area tomorrow, you can swing by the Torrance Airport, or Zamperini Field as it is called in honor of the late Louis Zamperini, where I will be giving a lecture on Catalina’s seaplane history and showing scenes from my documentary “Wings Across the Channel.”
The show begins at 11 a.m. at 3315 Airport Drive in Torrance and will last about an hour.
Did someone say seaplanes? Speaking of seaplanes, I thought it might be nice in this week’s column to cover one of the mysterious questions about our seaplane history out here at Catalina, namely why the seaplanes stopped coming to Catalina after more than 70 years.
We haven’t had any significant scheduled seaplane service out here since the early 1980s, but it’s a question that we still get asked from time to time out here.
On May 10, 1912, a seaplane flew out to Catalina for the very first time in history piloted by aviation legend Glenn Martin. Not only was it the first airplane to fly to Catalina, it literally was the first time in world history that an airplane had taken off from water (Newport Beach) and landed on water (Avalon Bay). In other words, the whole concept of what you think about when you hear the word “seaplane” started right here at Catalina.
For the next seven decades, Catalina enjoyed a roller coaster ride of various seaplanes and seaplane companies providing transportation to the island. Then, just as the industry was reaching its pinnacle at Catalina in the 1970s, it abruptly came to an end.
With few exceptions, the workhorse of the seaplane fleet for most of the 1950s through the ‘70s was the venerable Grumman Goose. But by the late 1970s, the fleet of Gooses was falling into greater and greater disrepair.
Built mostly in the 1930s, the planes used here at Catalina had seen decades of hard use, some of it in wartime, and nearly all of it, of course, in salt water.
Replacement parts were getting harder and harder to come by and some of the Gooses used by local airlines were not even allowed to land at Long Beach Airport because of their corroded landing gear. These planes were only allowed to make water take-offs and landings in Los Angeles Harbor and off Pebbly Beach here on the Island.
To compound the situation, seaplane pilots—a special breed of pilot—were becoming fewer in number. In most of the rest of the world, the seaplane had been in decline since the end of World War II due to the increasing number of land-based airfields being built worldwide.
The rising cost of airfare also contributed to the demise of seaplane service. For decades, a ticket on seaplane had only cost slightly more than a trip on the steamer. But starting in the late ‘70s, that difference began to grow larger because of a rising fuel prices and an increasingly litigious society. Much of that litigation, in fact, was the result of the most visible factor that helped bring seaplane service on Catalina to an end: accidents.
Unfortunately, there were increasing numbers of fatal and non-fatal Goose crashes in the 1970s that received wide publicity. In 1979, in fact, there were two high profile Goose crashes in the waters around Avalon within six months of each other, each resulting in a single fatality.
The last of the big-time seaplane operators to provide service to Catalina was Trans-Catalina, which operated not only land-based planes but also used the sister plane to the Grumman Goose, the Grumman Mallard.
But by 1982, even they had thrown in the towel and the end of the scheduled passenger service seaplane era had ended.
