Just thought I'd copy/paste this very interesting article here. It originated from 'J-Christophe' over on Swanny's. If I'm not supposed to be doing this, I'm willing to step out into the woodshed and take my spanking. Worth it, because seems to me that its an important discussion for anyone who just loves the Catalina.


WHAT’S IN A NAME by David Legg (a reference and friend)

When what became the Catalina was first put into production by the Consolidated Aircraft Corporation , it was given the company designation Model 28 followed by various suffixes denoting the country it had been built for (eg 28-5ME, the ‘5’ denoting the fifth variant of the Mod. 28 and ‘ME’ standing for ‘Military England’. In some cases, the letter ‘A’ was added for ‘amphibian’ – thus Model 28-5AMC was ‘Amphibian Military Canada’.

All the early orders and deliveries of the Model 28, apart from a very small number of commercial aircraft, were for the US Navy which used its own designation system. The Navy designation was PBY (P = Patrol, B = Bomber and Y = code for Consolidated – the letter ‘C’ had already been allocated to Curtiss). The designation PBY was followed by a numeral from -1 through, eventually, to -6 denoting progressively advanced models. Because the PBY designation was for the US Navy only, it did not strictly apply to other air arms such as the RAF.

The RAF had its own naming system and generally maritime aircraft were named after either ports or Admirals. Additionally, there was a tendency to have the first letter of the chosen name correspond with the first letter of the manufacturer. The names were initially chosen by the Air Ministry and then sometimes changed before use by the British Commission in Washington or vice versa. In the case of the PBY, the initial name suggested for RAF aircraft was ‘Plymouth’ (flouting the manufacturer ‘rule’) but this was quickly changed to ‘Catalina’. It had been suggested by Reuben Fleet of Consolidated, the name coming from Catalina Island off the California coast north-west of San Diego, the latter city being the location where all early Catalinas, apart from the first prototype, were built. Thus RAF aircraft were all called Catalina followed by a roman numeral denoting mark number eg: Catalina IV. The Americans then (1941) adopted the name themselves without changing their own Navy designations, hence PBY-5A Catalina. In reality, I suspect most ‘Navy people just referred to it as the ‘PBY’ or some other less flattering name in day-to-day parlance.

As an aside, the USAAF also used the Catalina and had its own designation system; thus its Catalina amphibian was the OA-10A (Observation Amphibian Model -10A).

As a further aside, the Royal Canadian Air Force also had its own system of names and applied this in some cases even if another name had been allocated by the Americans or the British. Thus, their name for the Catalinas that they ordered was the ‘Canso’, named after the Strait of Canso, a stretch of water between Cape Breton Island and the Nova Scotia Peninsular that also has a town named Canso in the area. An earlier plan to call it the ‘Convoy’ was sensibly abandoned when it was realised what confusion that could cause given the aircraft’s maritime convoy escort role! Before settling on Canso, other Canadian coastal towns were briefly considered. The RCAF did also operate a number of ex-RAF Catalinas that strictly did not qualify for the Canso name as they had not originally been built for the RCAF. The RCAF’s Canso A was the amphibian version of the pure flying boat Canso.

Perhaps inevitably it gets more complicated than I have summarised above and a small book could be written on the subject! Over the years, some ‘urban myths’ about Catalina names have developed. The first is that the name Canso denotes the amphibious version of the Catalina. Not so – as detailed in the paragraph above, Canso only applied to aircraft ordered on RCAF contracts and included pure flying boat examples as well as amphibs. The many amphibious Catalinas operated by the US Navy and USAAF had no claim to the Canso name. The second myth appears in the book Names withWings by Gordon Wanborough-White where the author states that the name Canso was derived from CANadian ConSOlidated - complete tosh!