PBY Catalina in Action

No design can challenge the PBY Catalina for being the most successful flying boat ever produced. In production continuously for over ten years, it was built in larger numbers than any other flying boat, in fact, it was built in larger numbers than all other flying boats combined. Ironically, the PBY would probably never have been produced had Consolidated not underbid Douglas in mid-1935, when the Navy requested bids, from the industry for a production batch of patrol planes based on the Consolidated XP3Y-1 and the Douglas XP3D-1 prototypes. The PBY was names "Catalina" by the British in November 1940, shortly after the delivery of the first of many PBYs that would eventually serve with the RAF. When the United States officially decreed names for aircraft in 1941, many British designations for airplanes common to the two nations, included Catalina for the PBY, were adopted. The Canadians identified the RCAF version of the PBY flying boat as "Canso" and the amphibian as "Canso A". Still another, not widely known name of a PBY variant was "Nomad", the name for the PBN-1, a major redesign of the PBY-5 undertaken and produced by the naval Aircraft Factory at Philadelphia in 1944-45.