SeaMaster

With bated breath and crossed fingers, the Navy has been watching the flight tests of the Martin XP6M-1 SeaMaster, the world's first multi-jet sea bomber. This week it authorized Glenn L. Martin Co. to say that it considers the SeaMaster "unusually promising." Behind the development of the SeaMaster is a vigorous bid by the Navy to capture an important chunk of the military flying business.

Seaplanes have important advantages: they can take off from water runways that cost nothing and may be as long as necessary. If they stay near some sizable body of water, they have a chance to make emergency landings without crackup.

In the early years of aviation, these advantages were important. Long airstrips on land were few. and the unreliability of early engines made seaplanes desirable over oceans. When airstrips grew longer and engines more reliable, seaplanes almost disappeared. To keep their propellers out of the water, their engines had to be mounted on some high, cumbersome structure, and this made them less efficient for most purposes than land-based aircraft.

Snug as a Duck. With the coming of jet engines, the tide (the Navy hopes) has turned again. A jet seaplane with no propellers to worry about can sit on the water as snug as a duck. It needs no landing gear, and this considerable weight-saving permits the hull to be strengthened for rough-water landings. Independent of prepared airstrips, it can make a very long run before taking to the air. Martin believes that this advantage will permit it to carry bigger loads than land-based airplanes of similar size.

The SeaMaster. the first good-sized craft to test seagoing jet engines, is comparable in length and wing span to a big airliner. Its four Allison J71 turbojet engines with take-off afterburners can get it into the air with a 30,000-lb. payload and push it faster than 600 m.p.h. at 40,000-ft. altitude. These characteristics make it a medium bomber, although its Navy sponsors, for fear of antagonizing the Air Force's Strategic Air Command and the Navy's own airplane-carrier partisans, prefer to call it a "mine layer." Portable Base. If the SeaMaster proves out as its friends hope, it will add a new dimension to long-range air warfare. It will need no elaborate, fixed and vulnerable bases. Instead, it can establish itself in any sheltered body of water within 1,000 miles of the enemy target. The few supplies that it will need can be brought by submarine, if necessary, and enemy reconnaissance would have a hard time spotting such a sketchy "base" before the mission is completed. The next strike could be based on a different bay or lagoon.

To service the SeaMaster at a semipermanent base, Martin is designing a weird and wonderful set of accessories.

When the SeaMaster alights on its liquid runway and wants to go ashore, it will ease its slender hull between the floats of a semi-submerged "beaching vehicle." Then it will move toward shore under its own power. A more elaborate auxiliary will be a drydock that can lift the SeaMaster clear of the water when it needs major attention.

Many competent authorities believe that the Navy's great carriers are too vulnerable to venture in wartime near an enemy-held coast. Then the jet sea bombers, say their admirers, would come into their own. In fog-dimmed inlets dr palm-fringed lagoons, they could rendezvous with the submarines--and take off with their loads of H-bombs before the enemy realized that they were around.

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