The aircraft pron thread started this week featured a few flying boats and it made me wonder....
why are they no longer in service for commercial passenger transportation?
I mean.. there's got to be something the flying boats can still do well since having the entire flippin' ocean as a runway and the ability to still touch down in land has to be of some value no?
The three problems, on a commercial level, that I know of are:
1) While the entire ocean would be your runway, it is subject to weather conditions, often times being effected by a storm/system that is passing clear many miles away. While normal runways are also subject to weather closures and delays, they can continue operating fully or limitidly in mild or severe weather conditions that would all but scrub flying boat landings and takoffs. If you're running a commercial buisness and your bread-n-butter is your three daily buisness flights (morning noon and evening) from wherever to your state's capital and you regularly have to cancel your afternoon flights because of a summer evening breeze condition that creates chops and swells, your customers will not wait long before finding an alternative means of transporting themselves in and out for a day's meeting so they can be home for dinner reliabley
2) Safety has a price - practicality. To be profitable you need to be offering a service people will pay for. Often governments and institutions have procedures and policys in place to ensure a paying customers not only gets what they payed for, but recieves their services in a manner that won't kill them or put them in excessive harms way. When you think about building a flying boat to meet these requirements for handling 100 passengers a day, compare it to a traditional airliner that meets these requirments and handles 100 passengers a day, and the various weather conditions each can or can't operate in, and one choice quickly becomes more apparent as being the most economical and viable. Also, there's other factors to take into account that might not be as apparent. Think of how much negative press an emergency landing because of a common bird strike brings these days. Now think how much more common a problem bird strikes might be and how much more frequent these already regular occurances might be to aircaft that land and takeoff exclusively on waterways and that load/unload in marinas? Also a part of safety is maintenance to ensure safe flying condition of aircraft... if you've ever had to maintain a boat or car living next to the ocean, you already know this is 3-4x times as intensive and critical as for those who don't live next to or with salt water (and good luck making as much profit as your competition with your aircraft in the hangar at least 3-4x as often as theirs).
3) Economics. As it is the industry is very heavily driven by getting the most amount of X-pounds of cargo/passengers across Y-distances for the least $. Take that formula, apply it to flying boat industry models, then compare it to the existing compeition and competitors cost formulas (ontop of taking into account the previous safety and weather limitations implied from the previous points), and you've already lost - short of a global meltdown and flooding of most current and existing runways.
