Martin M-130 China Clipper

[Don Boose]

Reference to Excambrian (NC41881) brings back memories.

In the mid-1950s, I lived near a Maryland Air National Guard civilian mechanic who sometimes took me along to Harbor Field in Baltimore to spend the day watching P-51H and Ks and AT-6s shooting landings and wandering around the field looking t airplanes. Among the aircraft parked on the grass was a Columbia XJL-1 (cast off from Naval Air Station Patuxant River, if my memory serves correctly). The other was Sikorsky VS-44 NC41881, which, according to my mechanic friend (and my 65-year-old-memory) "some guys [were] fixing it up to haul freight in South America."

I took photos of both , but can't find them (they are in one of 42 boxes in the basement labeled "to be filed"), but I found these images of an XJL-1 in rather better condition that the one I knew (https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Columbia_XJL) and Excambrian at Harbor Field a few years prior to my making its acquaintance (https://www.airliners.net/photo/Unti...-VS-44A/286694).

I think my buddy Jim Reuter (JimR in this Forum) may have taken some photos of one or both airplanes. Bill Geoghegan (DrBill in this Forum) may have done the same. Either of them may have information to add.

By the way, when we first moved to Baltimore in December 1947, BOAC was still flying Boeing 314s from the Harbor Field seaplane terminal. To my very great regret, I never actually saw them, but was shown a film clip of one of them taking off sometime in the late 1940s.

None of this gets us much further on the Martin M-130 model, but I thought some might be interested in these old memories.

Don

[birder]

Aaron I hope you have time to do this one, ambitious for a model, but I think of this aircraft when I think of the Pan Am clippers. The S 42 is a plane I thought at one time to try to do, but my design skills are limited especially compared with you guys using Rhino or similar CAD they look really great. Not that it still isn't a lot of work, it still is for sure. The complex shapes of the Martin I really didn't try to figure. Nothing more romantic in an airplane that a flying boat, Kermt Weeks has recently uploaded a tour of his Short Sunderland....really cool stuff.

[alzictorini]

Wasn’t the China Clipper in most of the Indian Jones movies?

Love the history Don - Always happy to read such material.