Black Cats and Dumbos Wwii's Fighting Pbys

Blue Ridge Summit, PA: Aero Publishers. Very Good+. 1987. 1st Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. 0830683917 . B&W Illustrations; This is a trade paperback book. The book is in Very Good+ condition and was issued without a dust jacket. The book and its contents are in generally clean, bright condition. There is some light rubbing and wear to the book covers, along with some light scratching. "As American dominance in the Pacific Ocean began to face competition from Japan in the 1930s, the U. S. Navy contracted Consolidated, Martin and Douglas in October 1933 to build competing prototypes for a patrol flying boat. Naval doctrine of the 1930s and 1940s used flying boats in a wide variety of roles that today are handled by multiple special-purpose aircraft. The U. S. Navy had adopted the Consolidated P2Y and Martin P3M models for this role in 1931, but both aircraft were underpowered and hampered by inadequate range and limited payloads. Consolidated and Douglas both delivered single prototypes of their new designs, the XP3Y-1 and XP3D-1, respectively. Consolidated's XP3Y-1 was an evolution of the XPY-1 design that had originally competed unsuccessfully for the P3M contract two years earlier and of the XP2Y design that the Navy had authorized for a limited production run. Although the Douglas aircraft was a good design, the Navy opted for Consolidated's because the projected cost was only $90,000 per aircraft. " (from Wikipedia) .