A Fitting Send Off for a Beautiful, Historic Plane

August 12, 2024 9:18 AM

After years of trying to find a contract or buyer, Coulson Aviation has donated one of their last-of-a-kind Martin JRM Mars WW2 seaplane-turned-waterbombers to the BC Aviation museum. This weekend, the plane made it's last flight from Port Alberni to Victoria, escorted by the Royal Canadian Air Force Snowbirds team. I don't have any personal connection to this event, but I love aircraft and seeing this big bird fly in formation brought me to tears in my office this morning. (Coulson's other Mars aircraft, Phillipine Mars, will make its last flight to the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson later this year.)
posted by Popular Ethics (21 comments total)

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posted by Alterscape at 9:31 AM on August 12 [1 favorite]

That butterfly-kiss of a landing (descent starting @37 minute mark), with the escort planes' last plumes in the background, is practically cinematic.
posted by Iris Gambol at 9:41 AM on August 12 [3 favorites]

She's fantastic.

My work unit donated our last plane, a WW2-vintage DC-4 to the not so long ago too. She flew cargo in the European theatre then was a Search and Rescue plane for many years. She was with us as a test bed plane for experimental remote sensors for environmental emergencies. She's since been restored to her wartime livery by the Canadian Wartime Heritage Museum.

No, I don't have a point. I just love these old birds.
posted by bonehead at 9:46 AM on August 12 [9 favorites]

There is something truly majestic about the old birds that doesn't quite get replicated in today's crafts.
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:53 AM on August 12 [2 favorites]

An elegant weapon for a more civilized age.
posted by tspae at 9:56 AM on August 12 [4 favorites]

ooh I wonder when they're gonna fly the one to the Pima Air & Space Museum. I live five minutes from there. I've always wanted to see them tow a plane across Valencia Road. What they do is they fly a plane to Davis Montana Air Base, which is just to the south, and then they tow the plane from there. The DMAFB fence has a gate made specifically for towing aircraft through to PASM, and it makes for scenes like the one on this page.
posted by azpenguin at 9:58 AM on August 12 [4 favorites]

bonehead: She's since been restored to her wartime livery by the Canadian Wartime Heritage Museum.

I live near CWHM, and I saw the Dakota flyover my house yesterday! There's nothing like the sound of 2400 horsepower worth of piston engine tearing away at the air.

See also the Lancaster Bomber, which also regularly flies over my house on tourist flights. It's too bad the Mars won't be a flying exhibit like VeRA.
posted by Popular Ethics at 10:03 AM on August 12 [4 favorites]

I grew up on the lake where the last two were based. For 20 years, and intermittently for anther 20 after I moved out, I awoke every summer morning to the sound of those engines. We used to paddle our inner tubes and row boats out into the wakes, the biggest waves that ever formed on the lake. It was a roller coaster.

These things were one of the loves of my dad's life. He and my mom used to take their boat out and poke around them in the morning mist, taking photos as the sun rose, getting the occasional tour of the inside. I wish he could have been here for this but he died almost exactly 2 years ago.

Now, Hawaii Mars is sitting silent outside my office window. Yesterday, mom and I (and about a thousand others) watched it land for the last time. It's really interesting to see the outpouring of love for something I almost took for granted for more than 40 years of my life. We feel a bit proprietary about them, but they're really part of our identity as Islanders.
posted by klanawa at 10:19 AM on August 12 [18 favorites]

I experienced the takeoff of one of those planes on Sproat Lake and it was one of the loudest, most majestic planes I ever saw, especially since it looked like it picked up some water and slowly ascended over the tall trees.
posted by myopicman at 10:54 AM on August 12 [3 favorites]

We're so used to buying "stuff" and tossing it after it's perceived to be worn out. I rarely see cars from my youth, or even from my children's era. Yet these magnificent planes are kept operating and in good shape for so long. The hands that made that plane are likely long gone, yet a multi-generational institutional effort has kept them in the air. It represents the best of "homo makus".
posted by Carmody'sPrize at 11:15 AM on August 12 [2 favorites]

The B-52A first flew in 1954, and the B model entered service in 1955. A total of 744 B-52s were built, with the last, a B-52H, delivered in October 1962.

The Air Force currently expects to operate B-52s through 2050.

posted by achrise at 12:09 PM on August 12 [2 favorites]

I love me some B-52s as well, especially since they first flew only a year before I was born. But those Martins...what magnificent aircraft!
posted by lhauser at 12:14 PM on August 12

I remember back in the '80s my uncle, who served on a B-17 bomber, and I went to an airshow and they had B-17 and they let him see everything even offered to let him go up.

take the kid here I've already seen The view.

I remember looking back at his face and it was filled with a lot of emotion that I can only describe his bittersweet yet the demeanor of a person who has accepted and dealt with the past.
it's lovely thing when the tools of War can be turned into a museum.
posted by clavdivs at 4:25 PM on August 12 [3 favorites]

I've always had a soft spot for seaplanes. My parents were in the New Zealand Air Force when they met and spent a lot of time in the Sunderland Bombers out of bases at Whenuapai and Laucala Bay in Fiji. I got to visit the memorial there a couple of years ago and walk around the places where they lived and worked in the period post WWII.

It's a shame more of these old planes can't be kept flying.
posted by dg at 5:51 PM on August 12 [2 favorites]

That is one beautiful plane. It's not the biggest plane in the world, but maybe it ought to be.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:01 PM on August 12 [1 favorite]

The YouTube video unexpectedly made me cry.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 6:19 PM on August 12 [4 favorites]

I was lucky enough to get to watch her pass over and then land yesterday. Especially seeing her coming from the distance, gradually growing larger, flanked by the Snowbirds (Canada's aerobatic troup) and just dwarfing them. Watching her fly over then slowly bank and make a 180 degree turn before coming in to land was awe-inspiring in a way modern planes just aren't. Hearing the roar of her engines that totally drown out the ten jet planes flying with her.

I also got to see her in action fighting a wildfire before she was retired, some twenty years ago. She was skimming the water to fill up over and over again right in front of the place my wife and I were caretaking on a semi-private island.

I just love flying boats; they remind me of Hayao Miyazaki films like "Porco Rosso" and "Laputa: Castle in the Sky" with their crazy flying machines. Except these are real! I imagine taking a tour of the world in one. There are historic trains and historic cruises, why not historic aviation trips? (probably because it's much harder to keep old planes airworthy and would be crazy expensive)

I've been to some big aviation museums, like the one in Seattle, but the small BC Aviation Museum where the Hawaii Mars will be a permanent exhibit is my favourite. It's such a labour of love, completely run by volunteers. The docents are almost all retired pilots and will gladly talk your ear off telling stories while showing off the collection. I can't wait to see the Mars up close, and to climb in and sit in the pilot's seat.
posted by borsboom at 6:43 PM on August 12 [5 favorites]

I can't help myself sorry. Here's some great air to air photography of Hawaii Mars from Skies Magazine (via FB):
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/NKmdWQRzcAkUVbXq/?mibextid=oFDknk

And some great drone/ boat footage of her taxiing from Coulson Aviation:
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/3iFEqLVDzM3WTr5R/?mibextid=oFDknk
posted by Popular Ethics at 6:58 AM on August 13 [1 favorite]

The Pima museum doesn’t give a date yet either. This is their announcement of the donation.

Anyhow if I’m in PHX when it comes in I could go down to Tucson to see. But when?
posted by nat at 1:15 PM on August 13

Yet these magnificent planes are kept operating and in good shape for so long. The hands that made that plane are likely long gone, yet a multi-generational institutional effort has kept them in the air.

The effort required to keep an 80 year old plane that was mass manufactured in a war-time industrial space cannot be overstated. Several aviation safety channels I follow have peripheral relationships with the Commemorative Air Force here in the states, and a frequent topic is the risk incurred from (1) performing both regular maintenance and periodic overhauls on machines that we are constantly losing the living memory of their operation and (2) relying on volunteers, emotional relationships and regulation carve outs to keep the institutions afloat.

To some degree, simple machines are made to last, sure. But the reality of the 1940s is that no one building P-51s back in the day would have been surprised if that warbird didn't survive more than 4 years based on its mission profile. In addition to profound survivorship bias, the continued operation of these plane makes us take it for granted the profound amount of labor that goes into keeping them airworthy.
posted by midmarch snowman at 6:23 AM on August 15 [1 favorite]

Here's a picture of the plane as of a couple of hours ago. They're preparing to drag it across the road and up to the airport to the museum.

Incidentally, this is very near to where Caroline Mars was destroyed in 1962.
posted by klanawa at 4:09 PM on August 15