Seaplane tender

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USS Timbalier (AVP-54) with two Martin PBM Mariner
Childs seaplane tender 1944

Seaplane tenders were ships that were used for the refueling, maintenance and accommodation of the crews of seaplanes , but in contrast to seaplane carriers did not carry aircraft on board, but could only take them on board for maintenance work.

history

A seaplane tender did not carry and look after the aircraft assigned to it on board, but rather its seaplanes swam around it and were only looked after and maintained by the tender's crew. The US was largely the only user of larger vehicles in this class of ship. The reasons lay in the operational area for these ships, the meteorologically quieter zones of the Pacific , the lower construction costs compared to seaplane carriers and the possibility of one ship taking care of more seaplanes than a seaplane carrier could. A seaplane carrier could only carry a few of the mostly large seaplanes on board, but a seaplane tender could, depending on its size, take care of one or two squadrons lying around it in the water.

For the United States , the aim of using the seaplane tenders was to have mobile bases for their long-range sea reconnaissance aircraft for military aerial reconnaissance in the vast expanses of the Pacific Ocean. The stations of their seaplane tenders were calm water areas on islands, which offered the best possible take-off and landing opportunities for the seaplanes. In the 1930s, the US Navy converted a number of old destroyers from the First World War into seaplane tenders, and from 1939 dozen of new seaplane tenders belonging to the Barnegat / Casco and Curtiss classes were built. With the displacement of seaplanes by land planes after the Second World War, the seaplane tenders also gradually disappeared. The last representatives of this class were the ships of the Currituck class, which also included the USS Pine Island .

USS Pine Island lifts a Martin PBM on board for maintenance during the Vietnam War in 1965

literature

  • Siegfried Breyer: Aircraft cruisers, aircraft mother ships , aircraft tenders up to 1945 , Podzun-Pallas-Verlag, Wölfersheim-Berstadt, 1994, ISBN 3-7909-0509-7 .