Coming face-to-face with a truly rare airplane is one of aviation’s singular rewards. And to actually see it fly, oh, be still my fluttering aviation geek heart. The Martin Mars is coming to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, and for the first time since I don’t remember when, I will secure a prime spot on the flight line when it appears on the air boss’s schedule. When it is not flying, the huge four-engine flying boat will be bobbing somewhere on Lake Winnebago, and I must find the spot that will let me watch its transition from a liquid fluid to the vaporous fluid that sustains life—and powered flight.
Being the last flying example of the five Martin Mars ever built makes the airplane rare. What makes it special, at least to me, is that it closes the circle, as large flying boats go, with my first quest to see a unique and formerly unseeable airplane, the Hughes H-4 Hercules, more commonly known as the Spruce Goose, because the two airplanes are related, in a way. Either by design, in the H-4’s case, or ultimate mission, for the Mars, both of them were cargo carriers safe from marauding submarines, albeit in different oceans.
Needing to get material across the Atlantic, where German U-board wolf packs roamed, the War Department issued a requirement for a flying cargo ship, preferably made of something other than the “strategic materials” of aluminum and steel. The contract for the Mars, originally designed as a Navy patrol bomber, was issued in 1938. A scaled up version of Martin’s twin-engine PBM Mariner, it first flew in 1942, about the time the War Department let the contract for the Hercules.
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