There is a particular kind of grief that comes when an era ends not with a bang but with the quiet settling of a hull onto still water for the last time. On February 10th of 2025, the Philippine Mars, the last of the working flying boats in the world, made her final flight, touching down at Lake Pleasant, Arizona, before being transferred to her permanent home at the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson. I watched the news with a lump in my throat and, I will confess it, a tear in my eye. She was the last of a breed that changed the world, and now she is gone from service forever.
Before I go further, I want to address something that matters to those of us who flew in these glorious machines. The Philippine Mars is not a seaplane. She is not a floatplane. She is a flying boat, and the distinction is not merely technical. It is fundamental. A floatplane is an aircraft adapted for water operations, fitted with pontoons beneath a conventional fuselage. A seaplane is amphibious, capable of operating from either land or water. A flying boat, however, is something else entirely. Her hull is the hull of a boat. She can only take off and land on water. She has no landing gear, no runway ambitions, no compromise with the land. She was born of the sea and she returns to it. There is a purity to that design which I find deeply moving.
I have a personal stake in this story. I had the honor of serving among the last aircrew to fly a mission in the Martin P5-M, Marlin, before that magnificent bird was retired from active duty in San Diego, California, in 1968. I had many adventures in that aircraft leading up to that day, of its final flight; stories I will save for another time. What I will say is that a flying boat becomes a part of you in a way that a land-based aircraft simply does not. For one thing, there is a special feeling to the moment a flying boat breaks free of the water and takes to the sky. It is a sensation without equal in aviation. For another, I’ve never set an anchor and spent the night aboard a land-based aircraft.
When the P5-M was retired from service, something irreplaceable went with her. Now, with the Philippine Mars gone from service as well, I find myself standing at the end of a very long road.
Where It All Began
The story of the flying boat began in 1913 with Glenn Curtiss and his Model F, the first true flying boat. Not a floatplane, not a hybrid, but a proper aircraft whose fuselage was designed from the keel up to operate on water. The Model F went on to serve in the First World War with the U.S. Navy, the Russian Imperial Navy, and the Italian Navy, proving that the concept was not a curiosity but a genuine advance in aviation capability.
The appeal was obvious. In an era when airfields were rare, expensive, and geographically limited, any stretch of navigable water became a potential runway. The world is covered in harbors, rivers, lakes, and bays. The flying boat could go where nothing else could, and the period between the two world wars saw this type of aircraft develop at a remarkable pace, both commercially and militarily.
The Golden Age: Pan Am and the Clippers
For most people of a certain generation, the flying boat means one thing above all others: the Pan American Clipper. The Boeing 314, introduced in the late 1930s, was perhaps the most glamorous aircraft ever built. She could carry up to 74 passengers across oceans in a style that has never been matched since. Travelers referred to the Clippers as flying hotels, and the description was not an exaggeration. There were dining rooms with white tablecloths, lounges where passengers could gather and talk, and sleeping quarters for those crossing the Pacific or Atlantic overnight. Pan American used the 314 to pioneer transoceanic routes that connected continents and made the world feel, for the first time, genuinely small.
There is a remarkable story connected to the 314 Clipper and the opening days of the Pacific War in December of 1941, a story involving a Clipper caught in the wrong place at precisely the wrong moment in history. But that story deserves its own telling.
What the Clipper represented was the high-water mark of commercial aviation elegance, a brief and shining moment when flying was not mere transportation but a luxurious experience inside a statement about what human beings can achieve when they set their minds to conquering the sky and sea together.
Flying Boats at War
The Second World War demonstrated just how versatile the flying boat could be in a military context. Though not technically a flying boat, no aircraft of the conflict earned more affection than the Consolidated PBY Catalina, a long-range patrol bomber and air-sea rescue aircraft that served in virtually every theater of the war. The Catalina was not glamorous. She was slow and ungainly, and her crew quarters were cramped and uncomfortable on long missions. But she was durable, she was reliable, and she saved more lives than can be easily counted.
It was a Navy PBY, flown by Ensign Jack Reid, that located Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s fleet in the days before the Battle of Midway, one of the most consequential pieces of aerial reconnaissance in the history of naval warfare. That discovery helped turn the tide of the Pacific War. A flying boat did that.
And then there is the aircraft that never quite made it to war but refused to be forgotten: the Hughes H-4 Hercules, better known as the Spruce Goose. Designed by Howard Hughes to transport troops and cargo across the Atlantic, she was completed too late to serve her intended purpose. She flew only once, on November 2, 1947, and she remains to this day the largest flying boat ever built. Whatever one thinks of Hughes, the Spruce Goose stands as a monument to a particular kind of American ambition, the belief that no engineering problem is truly insoluble if you are willing to think large enough.
The Martin Family: From the P5-M to the Mars
The Martin Company produced two flying boats that define the later years of the type’s military service, and I write about both of them with some personal investment.
The Martin P5-M Marlin was the Navy’s last operational flying boat. A twin-engine antisubmarine and maritime patrol aircraft, she entered service in the early 1950s and served through the late 1960s. She was not the most celebrated aircraft of her era, overshadowed by jet-age successors and land-based patrol aircraft. But to those of us who flew her, she was a serious and capable machine. When her engines went quiet for the last time as a naval aircraft, an entire chapter of American maritime aviation history went silent with them.
The Martin JRM Mars was an altogether larger proposition. Development began in 1938, when the Navy recognized the need for a long-range heavy patrol bomber and later a transport capable of operating across the vast distances of the Pacific. The first prototype flew in 1941, and though the original mission evolved considerably as the war progressed, the Mars ultimately proved her worth as a heavy transport. Only seven were ever built. They were enormous aircraft, with a wingspan of 200 feet and a range of approximately 5,000 miles, and they carried troops and cargo across oceanic distances that would have been unthinkable for land-based aircraft of the same era.
After the war, the Mars might have simply faded away like so many of her contemporaries. Instead, four of the surviving aircraft were acquired by Forest Industries Flying Tankers of British Columbia, and they found a second career that proved as dramatic as anything the Navy had asked of them. For four decades, the Philippine Mars and her sister aircraft operated out of Sprout Lake in British Columbia, scooping water from lakes and dropping it on wildfires across the Canadian wilderness. She could carry nearly 7,000 gallons of water per drop. She was, in every practical sense, still working, still useful, still earning her place in the sky, decades after every other flying boat of her generation had gone to a museum or a scrapyard.
That is the aircraft we said goodbye to on February 10th.
The Future of the Flying Boat
It would be a mistake to say the flying boat has no future, even as we mourn the end of its working past. There are designers and engineers today who look at the problems of the modern world, flooded coastlines, remote island communities, wildfire suppression, disaster relief, and see in the flying boat a set of solutions that land-based aviation simply cannot provide. Several companies are actively developing new flying boat and seaplane concepts, from small electric aircraft intended for island-hopping routes to larger designs aimed at the wildfire suppression mission the Mars performed so faithfully.
The Japanese ShinMaywa US-2, currently in service with the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, proves that the flying boat is not merely a nostalgic artifact. She is a sophisticated, capable, modern aircraft that does things no land-based airplane can do. There are conversations underway in several countries about reviving the type for both military and commercial purposes.
So perhaps the tear is not only for what is lost but for what might yet come. The era of the great flying boats, the lumbering Clippers, the patrol Catalinas, the firefighting Mars, that era is indeed over. But the idea of the flying boat, the elegant solution to the problem of an earth that is mostly water, that idea has not finished surprising us.
A Farewell
I have been around long enough to have flown aboard a Martin flying boat and felt the water moving beneath me, to have lifted off a California bay on a patrol mission and watched the sea fall away below. That is a memory I carry with me. The Philippine Mars carried her own memories: forty years of smoke and flame and mountain lakes and forests saved. She deserved her retirement, and the Pima Air and Space Museum is a good home for her.
But I will not pretend the world of aviation is not a little smaller now that she is no longer flying. The sky and the sea were meant to meet somewhere, and for over a century, the flying boat was the place where they did. It was a magnificent arrangement while it lasted.
Godspeed, Philippine Mars. You were the last of something wonderful.
The author served in the U.S. Navy and was a member of the final aircrew to fly a mission in the Martin P5-M Marlin before its retirement in San Diego, California, in 1968.
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