“Flying Boats” Airborne Today

Alex Frame’s book, “Flying Boats: My Father’s War in the Mediterranean”, was launched Thursday beside the Solent flying boat inside the Sir Keith Park Memorial Aviation Hangar at MOTAT.

The honours were done by Mauri McGreal who flew with Alex’s dad in WWII and invited guests included other former pilots and crew who flew in both peacetime and war. There’s huge interest in these extraordinary machines. MOTAT’s got the only restored Solent Mark IV Flying Boat in the world and there’s also a Sunderland like the one that’s the real star of “Flying Boats”.

Flying Boats: My Father’s War in the Mediterranean
Alex Frame
published by Victoria University Press
$40 pb
52 photographs and maps

“Flying Boats: My Father’s War in the Mediterranean” is a blend of personal memoir and war history. Alex Frame’s father was a flying boat pilot in war and afterwards in peace, and the roots of this book are the logbooks he kept over his 30 year career, the first covering early flights in 1938 and the war years, the second flying in Sydney and then Tahiti and the surrounding islands of French Polynesia.

This book concentrates on the years of World War II, and the star of the story is the Sunderland flying boat T9046, while under the command of Alex’s father from November 1940 to June 1941. During this concentrated period of setbacks and disasters for the Commonwealth and British forces, the crews of the large, graceful flying boats were both saviours and victims in the struggle against Hitler’s war machine.