Philippine Mars, one of two surviving JRM Martin Mars flying boats, finished its four-month journey to the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona, early Saturday. The final leg of the trip was a 150-mile highway trek from Lake Pleasant, north of Phoenix. The plane was flown from Vancouver Island to Lake Pleasant in early February and has been dismantled at the boat launch at the lake. The engines, tail and wings were removed and shipped to the museum. The fuselage was put on a massive trailer for the trip, which took about a week because utilities and traffic lights had to be removed to make way for the massively oversized load.
The plane will now be reassembled at the museum and should be on display later this year. It will join about 400 other aircraft in the collection. Philippine Mars was one of seven built for the Navy near the end of the Second World War. They were mainly used to carry cargo and personnel between Hawaii and California. The four surviving aircraft were retired in the 1950s and sold to a consortium of forest companies in British Columbia, which converted them into self-loading water bombers. They fought fires for almost 40 years. One was lost in a crash and another in a storm, but their final private owner, Coulson Air Tankers, kept the two remaining aircraft maintained for a decade after they were retired in 2015. Philippine Mars’s sister ship Hawaii Mars appeared at AirVenture nine years ago and was donated to a British Columbia museum last summer.
