Consolidated PBY-5 Catalina..next installment

A couple of small points of RAAF information for your files Mick.
The Ryan 'eyeball' turret appears to have been fitted to mid war PBY-5 boats and 5A amphibians, apparently new aircraft.
However, retro fits to several older airframes were carried out by No.1 Flying Boat Repair and Service Depot at RAAF Lake Boga.
Radar fittings were varied, A24-2 may have been the first, wearing ASV 'hand rails' locally manufactured (as were the Radar sets) similar to the early RAF pattern.
Not many 'boats' appear to have used the 'Bullet' radar fairings, but they were common on Boeing Canada PB2B-2 boats and amphibians.
A24-353, A24-360 and A24-206 of No.43 Squadron were fully kitted out, '353' and '360' complete with tall fin and rudder while '206' retained the short version.
When Patwing 10 reached Australia after a fighting retreat from the Philippines they were reduced to a pair of PBY-4s, promptly taken on charge by the RAAF and given serials A24-28 and A24-29.
IIRC they operated mostly in the communication role, and in early 1944 received the PBY-5 standard tail surfaces, painted in silver dope overall and wearing RAAF blue/white roundels.
Might be an unusual paint for the between the Wars 'Cats'.
:adoration:
 
Well, that answers a question, and it shows that AS wasn't out of order in putting the eyeball turret on their -5. Not that I minded all that much, but I would've preferred the cheese box type - as Shessi has provided.

I'm not surprised to learn that the Commonwealth forces used their ingenuity to produce variants different from what the USN had. I'm sure there are plenty of analogous situations regarding other American types in the Pacific theaters.

Thanks for the interesting tidbits.
 
Mick, Guys,
The civvy version would be easy to do, when I get the 5A done, so no prob (?!) with that.

W666,
As I was getting more into the PBY I bought the excellent Warpaints series book on the PBY Catalina. Really explains all the models and most variations, especially the designations and who used them.

Re-radar. Coastal Command (CC) were the first to put the yaggi aerial MkII radar on the Catalina PBY-5, but that also came with the 'handrails' on the nose and side scan yaggi's from the cockpit area. The US followed. The reason for having two sets of aerials was that early valve based radar couldn't transmit AND receive with the same aerials (a limitation of valve technology being able to switch between send and receive quick enough on one aerial), hence the two sets, one send and one receive.
The US initially used the British front fuselage 'hand rail' array, then went to a Sterba wire array aerial strung from the tail to the centre section of the rear of the wing, for the receiving aerial. They are difficult to see, and so usually people only see/paint or model the wing yaggi aerials.

As radar (valve technology) improved, they got rid of the fuselage and Sterba array radar aerials and just had the wing yaggi's.

When the cavity magnetron became available, centimetric radar, this allowed the use of the dish scanner which is in the bullet fairing. The reason why you don't see them (or very few) on any PBY-5's, is that by the time this became available, 1944, the US had almost all 5A amphibians.

The reason for seeing ac with both the bullet faired radar and the yaggi aerials, is that the centimetric radar was good at broad scanning searches, but not as good as the yaggi's for pin pointing a target, so both being fitted for the different phases of search and attack. Both CC and US ac were fitted with this combo.

Later on, towards the end of the war, as radar developed again, the yaggi's were not fitted as the scanning radar improved to the point that it could do both search and attack all in one. Which is how modern radar operates.

There are a lot of different nationality combo and retro-fits as well, which makes it not an exact science as to what was fitted to what?!

Cheers

Shessi
 
When you're talking about the used radars on the PBY I wonder what the Swedish Catalinas used cause the nose turret looks like a modified radar section, does someone have information about it?

Best regards,
Elmar
 
It's a joy and a curse of digital modeling that we can have as many variants in as many liveries as we're industrious or obsessive enough to crank out and paint, and they'll all fit on a hard drive that lives in a box beneath our desk, or maybe in a carrying case.

Imagine trying to make every variant of the Catalina in the colors and markings of every service or company that ever flew it in plastic? Just think of how big a house you'd need, to have all that shelf space! You'd have to build a whole new model for every paint job.

Years ago I set out to model the Boeing F4B and the Curtiss SOC in all their versions and in the liveries of all the squadrons that flew them. I didn't get all the liveries done by a long shot, but I have quite a lineup of 1/72nd scale SOCs and F4Bs sitting on their glass shelf behind cat-proof clear plastic sheet. And more kits in the basement if I ever feel compelled to make any more.

It's so much easier to be obsessive and compulsive in FS. And we can play with them in the sim, too!

But I'll probably have my plastic models long after it's no longer practical or possible to keep running a computer with an operating system that's compatible with FS9.
 
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