Luxury seaplanes, also known as flying boats, were a popular mode of travel in the 1930s. They offered all the accoutrements of sailing on a beautifully appointed ocean liner, like private sleeping rooms, fine dining, and white-gloved service, but got you to your destination in a fraction of the time.
Click through the gallery to see a selection of the most opulent of these ‘palaces of the air’ as well as a few of their modern equivalents…
The golden age of seaplanes began with the Dornier Wal, or ‘whale’, developed by Dornier Flugzeugwerke, a German aircraft manufacturer founded in Friedrichshafen by Claude Dornier.
The all-metal craft was powered by two engines, arranged in tandem on top of its high-mounted parasol wing, and could carry 12 passengers. Its range was limited, so on longer routes, like the South American one, it was met by a ship halfway along the route, winched onboard, refuelled and then catapulted on its way again (pictured).
Despite its obvious limitations, the Dornier Do J was soon pressed into service by airlines across the world, including those in Germany, Italy, Brazil, and Colombia as well as far afield as Japan.
Flying was no longer limited to places with airstrips, of which there were very few at the time. Anywhere there was water, a Dornier Wal could land. Here we see one moored off Kupari, in modern-day Croatia, then Yugoslavia.
After the success of the Wal, Dornier developed a larger version, the Do R, better known as the Superwal. It featured four engines, again in tandem, and an elongated body that lifted its capacity to up to 19 passengers.
The Superwal made its first flight on 30 September 1926 and was soon competing with zeppelins (pictured) as the fastest way to get from point A to B in the interwar years.
In all, only seven Superwals were built for Deutsche Lufthansa, including the charmingly named ‘Narwhal.’ While the larger cabin was more spacious, passengers were yet to be treated to the levels of luxury that would come with future generations of seaplanes.
The cabin featured bench seats made from wicker to keep the weight of the plane down. Embarking and disembarking along the bottom struts also required a certain dexterity from the well-dressed passengers (pictured).
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The year 1929 saw the launch of the Dornier Do X, the company’s most audacious seaplane yet. Powered by an extraordinary 12 engines, it was the largest, heaviest and most powerful flying boat in the world, with a wingspan of 157 feet (48m) and length of 130 feet (40m).
Indeed, such was the scale of the Do X that it took seven years to design and another two years to build. In the process, its designer, Dr Claudius Dornier, built the first one-to-one wooden mock-up of an aircraft in aviation history to test its viability.
The Do X was designed to carry 66 passengers on long-distance flights, and 100 on shorter flights. It was built to such a scale that it could offer those passengers lavishly appointed accommodations that rivalled the fabled standards of the era's transatlantic liners.
The plane boasted three decks altogether, with the main deck offering a smoking room with its own wet bar (pictured), a dining salon and luxurious seating arrangements that could be converted to sleeping berths on night flights.
In 1931, the era of commercial seaplanes dawned in America with the arrival of the Sikorsky S-40. It was a strong, sturdy, four-engine flying boat designed and commissioned by Pan American Airways to serve as an ocean liner of the air.
The first S-40 was christened ‘The American Clipper’ on 10 October 1931 by First Lady Lou Hoover, wife of President Herbert Hoover. She had to use a bottle filled with water from the Caribbean Sea, as Prohibition law still made alcohol illegal in the United States at the time.
The Sikorsky S-40s were referred to as ‘clippers’ because they were fitted with luxurious wood-panelled compartments reminiscent of ocean liners (pictured). Pan Am lent into the maritime theme by dressing their crew in naval-style uniforms, believing that it gave passengers a sense of security and professionalism.
It also encouraged people to think of airliners as an alternative to ocean liners, of course, and the nomenclature became standard, even when Pan Am moved on from the cumbersome Sikorsky S-40s to more streamlined offerings from the Glenn L. Martin Company and Boeing.
Pan American Airways was never completely happy with the Sikorsky S-40 clippers, finding that their ungainly design limited their speed, range, and fuel efficiency. In 1935, they turned to the Glenn L. Martin Company in Baltimore, whose M-130 flying boats would finally give them the true ability to span the world’s oceans.
The M-130s were called clippers too, but incorporated fuselage-mounted sponsons, or seawings, first seen on the German Dorniers, that made them far more efficient. Here we see the M-130 ‘Hawaiian Clipper’ being blessed by island chiefs in Pearl Harbor.
The M-130 could carry 46 passengers in its daytime configuration, but with Pan Am’s ambitions to fly to Europe and Hawaii, it usually flew in a more typical overnight layout with 30 passengers sleeping in three 10-berth compartments.
Whatever the configuration chosen, the aircraft’s legendary dining room and lounge compartment located amidships remained the same. Here we see passengers enjoying a luxurious dinner service, somewhere over the Pacific.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Biscarrosse in southwest France had become an important seaplane base. The Société Industrielle d’Aviation Latécoère company in nearby Toulouse spied an opportunity and, on 10 January 1935, launched the Latécoère 521 seaplane, the largest aircraft ever built in France at the time.
The Latécoère 521 was a six-engined double-deck flying boat designed by Pierre-Georges Latécoère. Resembling an ungainly pelican, it was 103.74 feet (31.62m) long, 29.76 feet (9.07m) high, and had a wingspan of 161.75 feet (49.30m).
The Latécoère 521 was designed to carry 72 passengers on trans-Mediterranean services. The main deck included the captain’s cabin, a salon for 20, six two-passenger cabins and an aft passenger cabin for 22 passengers.
As we can see from this illustration of the upper deck’s galley and bar, the interior was sumptuous and luxurious and redolent of French style.
Flying boats also represented the perfect way for Britain to connect its vast empire, and in 1936 the country’s Imperial Airways (later BOAC) commissioned Short Brothers in Kent to develop a seaplane that could service their international routes.
The result was the Short Empire, a medium-range four-engined monoplane flying boat, seen here moored at Pinkenba on the Brisbane River in far-flung Australia in 1939.
The route to Australia flew via the Middle East and India and was the longest one served. Imperial operated three flights a week, each one reaching Sydney after 10 days of flying and nine overnight stops.
Having said that, passengers aboard the Empire Shorts enjoyed a level of spacious comfort (pictured) unheard of today Such were the particular demands of connecting the colonies, however, a whole section of these innovative seaplanes was dedicated to carrying airmail and freight.
The introduction of the Boeing 314 Clipper in 1936 marks the apogee of the interwar Golden Age of Seaplanes. The 314 was the winner of a competition that saw Pan American Airways offer a cash prize of $50,000 ($1.14m/£1.1m in today’s currency) for the best design, with its astounding range of 3,500 miles (5,633km) excelling where the Sikorsky S-40 and Martin M-130 had fallen short.
As this glamorous poster advertising the Boeing 314 'Honolulu Clipper' shows, far-flung exotic destinations were now quicker and easier to reach, and in unrivalled luxury and style too.
Whereas today’s commercial aircraft squeeze passengers into a space measuring about six square feet (0.5sqm), each passenger aboard a Pan Am Boeing Clipper could luxuriate in 22 square feet (2sqm).
The only ticket sold was First Class. Sumptuous six course dinners were served on fine china and at night the passenger compartments were transformed into deluxe sleeper cabins, complete with dressing rooms. There was even a honeymoon suite located towards the rear of the plane, shown in this cutaway as the ‘Deluxe Room.’
Despite most commercial seaplanes being pressed into military service after the outbreak of World War II, Société Industrielle d’Aviation Latécoère, a company in Toulouse, took one last throw of the dice in 1942 with the massive Latécoère 631.
Weighing in at a staggering 79.4 tons (72,020kg), it was the largest flying boat ever built at that time. With a range of 4,225 miles (6,800km), it should have been the perfect civil transatlantic flying boat, but it was unreliable and expensive to run. Here we see a 631 moored off Hythe in southeast England.
As befitting a seaplane of such dimensions, its 50 passengers flew in unrivalled space and style, a necessity, one would suggest, when the 631 flew the world’s longest non-stop commercial flight at the time, linking Port-Étienne in France to Fort-de-France in Martinique.
Here we see a recreation of a 631 cabin at the Musée de l'Hydraviation in Biscarrosse, complete with reclining leather chairs. The evening dress worn by the passengers looked equally as sophisticated.
In 1952, the British manufacturer Saunders-Roe made one last attempt to revive the glory days of the interwar years. With an eye on securing a contract with the British flag carrier, BOAC, they hoped to build a larger and more luxurious successor to the pre-war commercial flying boats, like the Short Empire.
The result was the SR.45 Princess, the largest all-metal flying boat to have ever been constructed, a distinction it holds to this day. Here we see the first prototype, Princess G-ALUN, about to conduct its maiden flight on the Isle of Wight on 22 August 1952.
In an ideal world, the Princess would have served the lucrative transatlantic route, carrying up to 100 passengers between Southampton in the UK and New York City in spacious luxury. However, problems in developing the turboprop engines to power the plane saw BOAC lose interest and focus on land-based routes using the jet-powered De Havilland Comet instead.
The allure of jet engines, coupled with runway and airport improvements, meant that the Princess project was abandoned before a commercial flight was ever flown. The era of the large flying boat was over.
In 2017, however, the venerable Dornier company dipped its toes back into the water with the development of the Dornier-Seastar, an all-composite seaplane aimed squarely at the lucrative business market.
Now a joint venture between the Dornier family and Chinese investors, Dornier-Seawing recognised that its aircraft offered busy executives the chance to land closer to their ultimate destination rather than have to make their way from inconveniently located airports.
While the Seastar is much smaller than the Dornier giants that ruled the skies in the 1930s, the levels of luxury offered to passengers are just as high, especially in its VIP configuration.
Think premium leather seats, masses of shoulder and legroom, and large windows that flood the cabin with natural light.
What of the future of luxury seaplanes? Well, 2024 saw a more individualistic approach with the introduction of the ICON A5, billed as the world’s most exciting amphibious sport plane.
Neither a commercial nor commuter plane, it is best to think of the ICON as a kind of sports car for the air – and the sea. In fact, ICON brought in German design guru Klaus Tritschler from the BMW Group to help with its design.
The result is a two-seater seaplane that is exhilarating to fly and full of possibilities. With a range of over 420 nautical miles and low fuel burn, ICON argues that their A5 makes for the ultimate weekend getaway vehicle, putting the Bahamas, San Juan Islands, Catalina and Nantucket within easy reach for US residents.
Barely 23 feet (7m) long and with a wingspan of only 34.8 feet (10.6m), the A5 is a far cry from the behemoths of the Golden Age of Seaplanes. But the spirit remains the same, with the waters of far-flung, exotic destinations providing the runway to every imaginable adventure.
Now see how air travel has changed in every decade since the 1920s