So, how would you feel, if you were like head engineer on a project! Not only that, Your Team  produced THE best specimen of its kind, ever, and your company just received a mass production order from the US Navy!? Like, wow, man! Dancing in the aisles, high fives all over. Let's go out for brews!

Then, you get back in the plant THE NEXT MORNING and you get told your new product is obsolete, will see virtually no use and will be forgotten by posterity? Other than that, have a nice day.

Curtiss Aircraft Company's SC-1 Seahawk catapult scout floatplane design team must have felt the same empty hopelessness as the folks who finished tooling up the last model of horsedrawn buggies, the day Henry Ford's factory began producing the Model T automobile.

It did not matter to the world how good the product was, how much of an improvement on similar products which had come before, even that it was probably the best of its kind, ever. The product's time and place in history was over. 'Yesterday's news'...in aluminum and steel.

In Curtiss Aircraft's case, obsolescence occurred parallel with their new SC-1 Seahawk catapult floatplane design going into production...

...catapults were being removed from battleships and cruisers.

In the SC-1 Seahawk's instance, the late-1944-introduced aircraft was a worthy successor to the US Navy's Vought OS2U Kingfisher and Curtiss SOC Seagull. An all-metal, low-wing monoplane with plenty of strength, power, folding wings, adequate armament, the SC Seahawk certainly would have done a fine job, had it been introduced earlier in the history of catapult floatplanes. As 'twas, SC-1s did not replace older types throughout the Fleet, and only a relatively small number even saw action in the Pacific.

This book can serve as a worthy, fitting tribute to, "The Last of the Catapult Floatplanes." It's complete enough, authoritative enough and because of the subject's "lack of popularity," there will probably not be another tome written on the Curtiss SC Seahawk.

Cdr. Billy Jack ("B.J.") Long is a real-life hot pilot, flying stuff from the subject of his book, to the XFY-1 Sea Dart and F-102. His personal anecdotes give the first-hand man in the cockpit point of view, something rare in this genre.

Illustrations of every nature, from period photos to manual-excerpt line drawings, to a colour cover and colour period-advertisement are EVERYWHERE in this volume. If one "just" wants to devour the piccies, the book is STILL worth the price!

This book really, like REALLY rang my personal chimes, repeatedly playing "Anchors Aweigh!" ding-ingly thereon...because catapult floatplanes are an inherently hip, one-off subject. A volume this size (128 pages, ya-hoo!) is especially well-suited to cover a not-widely-used aircraft. Author B.J. Long deserves high honours for this doctoral thesis-level work, a danged proper presentation job.

Long's Curtiss SC-1 / 2 Seahawk is well laid out, in a familiar, reader-friendly manner. Especially welcome are the candid black and whites and text about the SC-1 in service, including pilot accounts. Several pages at the end also address plastic models of the SC-1, which is possible to build from smaller companies' kits.

This is an outstanding book on the subject, hands down. Well worth the retail price.

Recommended for floatplane and WW II USN enthusiasts.

Review copy courtesy of the reviewer's chequeboook, purchased at Al's Hobby Shop, Elmhurst, Illinois, USA

Reviewed by James Hood.

For Scott Van Aken's Modeling Madness review of James Hood's novel,
 Adventure--Into The Neverland, go to:  http://users3.ev1.net/~bjmonkeyandcj/James_Hood.htm

May 2005

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