Eighty years ago, a fat-bellied flying boat called the PBY Catalina rescued downed airmen, sank submarines and crossed oceans on missions that lasted a full day and night. Its type certificate has quietly survived ever since. Now someone wants to build brand-new ones — and fly them as flying yachts.

On 16 July, the Florida-based Catalina Aircraft Trust announced its first customer for the Catalina II, a modernised, turboprop version of the wartime legend. The buyer is an unlikely one: a Hong Kong start-up called Pan American Airways System, which has licensed the storied Pan Am name and signed a funded letter of intent for as many as 46 aircraft.

A legend with a live type certificate

The Catalina Aircraft Trust has spent more than a decade as custodian of the original PBY Catalina’s type certification, supporting the handful of vintage examples still flying. In 2023, at the Oshkosh airshow, it announced something bolder: a clean production restart, building new airframes based directly on the tried-and-tested 1930s design.

The logic, according to founder and company president Lawrence Reece, is that modifying an existing certificated type should be far simpler than certifying a clean-sheet aircraft from scratch. The Catalina II would, he argues, become the only Western-certificated transport-category flying boat — a genuinely unusual niche.

Flying yachts over Africa

Pan American Airways System — which licenses the Pan Am brand from Pan American Global Holdings — plans to operate the Catalina IIs as ultra-luxury aircraft: just ten seats apiece, with a lounge and galley, under the historic “Clipper” name once carried by Pan Am’s great transoceanic flying boats. The first routes would be African trunk services, such as Alexandria to Cape Town, hopping between luxury resorts and natural landmarks, before expanding to the Caribbean, South America and beyond.

It is a romantic vision. It is also, for now, just that. Much of the Catalina II’s development remains undone: engines, avionics and flight systems are still being evaluated, and the operator currently flies no other aircraft. First service is pencilled in for 2027, a date even sympathetic observers treat with raised eyebrows.

Why flying boats are suddenly interesting again

The timing is not entirely nostalgic. As militaries eye the vast distances of the Pacific, the old virtues of amphibious aircraft — long endurance, the ability to operate without runways, big internal loads — are back in fashion. The Trust is pitching the Catalina II for search-and-rescue, maritime patrol, firefighting and special missions, with claimed figures of up to 19 hours’ endurance and 30 troops or 16,000 lb of cargo.

It is not the only revival attempt: a separate Florida firm, the Catalina Aircraft Company of Vero Beach, is pursuing a more ambitious clean-sheet design called the SPAR. Whether either reaches a ramp is an open question. But for the first time in a long while, the flying boat — that graceful, improbable machine — has customers talking again.

The wartime PBY Catalina — the aircraft the Catalina II sets out to modernise.

Sources: FlightGlobal; The Aviationist; Catalina Aircraft Trust; AvBrief.