Miss Pick Up on Loch Ness

By David Legg
The Catalina Society
Don’t be deceived by her striking USAAF 8th Air Force Air-Sea-Rescue colour scheme and Second World War Miss Pick Up nose-art.  The Duxford, UK-based ‘Catalina’ G-PBYA has a long Canadian heritage which confirms that she was originally a Royal Canadian Air Force Canso A built in Quebec. But read on and you’ll see that she has very recently had to be the subject of her own rescue mission!
Miss Pick Up on the water of the lake at Biscarrosse in south-west France where we do much of our water training.
John Dibbs photo
Since 2004, G-PBYA has been a very popular and reliable participant on the European airshow circuit, her range enabling display organizers to book her to fly as far afield as Iceland, Arctic Norway, Russia, Spain and Turkey.  Operated by Plane Sailing Air Displays Ltd, she is owned by a group of shareholders collectively known as Catalina Aircraft Ltd and even has her own fan club – The Catalina Society. But let’s go back to the beginning.
Canso 2F 11005 when serving with No. 121 C&R Flight, Vancouver, BC, in the mid-1950s. David Legg collection

An RCAF Canso A

Miss Pick Up was built by Canadian Vickers Ltd at its Cartierville, PQ, factory in 1943 with the manufacturer’s number CV-283 and assigned the RCAF serial number 11005. Allocated to Western Air Command on 27 October 1943, Canso 11005 was initially operated by 9 (Bomber Reconnaissance, or BR) Squadron at Bella Bella, BC, before passing to 7 (BR) Sqn at Alliford Bay, BC, in August 1944. Converted to a Canso 2F freighter soon after the end of the war, 11005 subsequently flew in both survey and transport roles with a number of RCAF units including:
  • No. 123 Sqn; “K” Flight, North West Air Command;
  • Nos. 413 and 408 Sqns;
  • No. 123 Rescue Unit;
  • the Flying Boat Conversion School at Patricia Bay, Victoria, BC, and;
  • No. 121 C&R Flight at Sea Island, Vancouver (later No. 121 Composite Unit, or KU). 

At the end of her RCAF career, she came under the care of RCAF Station Lincoln Park (but actually stored at nearby Vulcan, AB) until transferred to the Crown Assets Disposal Corporation (CADC) and struck off charge on 25 May 1961.  The CADC sold 11005 to Frontier Air Transport that same month.
Canadian Vickers-built Canso A 11002 , came off the line at around the same time as 11005. It shows a typical RCAF example of the type in the overall white camouflage scheme used on the Cartierville-built Canso As. Fernand Henley via the Terry Higgins collection.
The port-side JATO "bottles" installation on Canso 2F 11003 is visible just ahead of the sliding hatch as the freighter is prepped for flight at Golden Lake, June 1950. DND photo via the Terry Higigns collection.

Another Busy Civilian Canso

Registered as CF-NJF, CV-283 then passed through the hands of Canspec Air Transport Ltd of Calgary, AB, before being converted to a waterbomber and operated by Kenting Aviation Ltd.  It spent time fighting fires in Canada and Chile, as well as several seasons in the South of France with the Protection Civile with which organisation it carried the French regsistrations F-ZBAY and F-ZBBD and used the call sign Pelican Bleu. In 1974, CF-NJF was sold to North Canada Air (Norcanair) and flew with them as “Tanker 14” until taken over by the Province of Saskatchewan as “Tanker 7” in June 1980. Subsequently replaced with more modern equipment, the venerable Canso, now registered C-FNJF, was sold to Hicks & Lawrence of St Thomas, ON, in the summer of 1997 and in due course she found her way to Nanaimo, Vancouver Island. There she underwent conversion to a passenger carrier by Ray Williams of Catalina Aero Services for the Malaysian consortium, YTL Charters.

The conversion work was carried out with the intention of flying passengers on tourist flights based out of Zimbabwe but the worsening political situation there led to the project being halted and C-FNJF, along with sister aircraft C-FNJB, was abandoned outside Ray Williams’ facility at Nanaimo where both aircraft started to deteriorate.

To the rescue came Plane Sailing Air Displays Ltd/Catalina Aircraft Ltd from England. The former company already had experience operating a Catalina in Europe, having flown the one-time Wright Cyclone-powered CF-MIR from 1985 to 1998. Searching for a replacement aircraft after losing their first in a water accident, they selected C-FNJF and got to work restoring it to a fit state to cross the Atlantic to its new home at the Imperial War Museum airfield at Duxford in Cambridgeshire where she arrived on 30th March 2004.  It spent that year on the airshow circuit, still in its Saskatchewan waterbomber livery and Canadian registration, but the following year was re-registered G-PBYA.
Looking for a distinctive new colour scheme that was predominantly white and representing a Catalina with a story, the author suggested USAAF OA-10A Catalina, serial number 44-33915 and nicknamed with the deliberate double ententre, Miss Pick Up.  This aircraft, had flown with 5 Emergency Rescue Squadron out of RAF Halesworth in Suffolk, not far from our Cambridgeshire base, during 1945 and was lost at the end of March that year when, alighting on the North Sea to rescue a downed P-51D Mustang pilot, it suffered engine failure and could not take off.  The following day, it was shot up and sunk by a marauding Luftwaffe Me 262 jet.  The crew took to a dinghy and in due course the would-be rescuers were themselves rescued and taken back to England by boat!  As the loss of 44-33915 was recorded on the engraved glass panels flanking the entrance to the American Air Force Museum at our Duxford base, it seemed a worthy aircraft to be commemorated by our own aircraft, despite her RCAF heritage.

In due course, we managed to source Second World War-vintage photos of the original Miss Pick Up artwork and this was faithfully reproduced on the forward hull of our aircraft.  This “branding” has since become well-known throughout Europe.

Incidentally, although a USAAF-service aircraft, 44-33915 was also built at the same Cartierville plant as 11005! The Canadian manufacturer, initially as Canadian Vickers and as Canadair Ltd (from 11 November 1944) built 230 of these dedicated search and rescue aircraft.
The original 44-33915 Miss Pick Up photographed at Debden, England in early-1945.
David Legg collection via John Dibbs
This period photo of the crew of the original Miss Pick Up shows the nose art detail more clearly.
Jason McKeon collection
An enlarged view of John Dibbs stunning photo of G-PBYA up on the step in France.

G-PBYA on Loch Ness, 16-17 October 2020

And so to the present and the second Miss Pick Up’s own rescue. 2020 has been a terrible year for the air display industry and almost all shows in Europe were cancelled due to the Coronavirus pandemic, thus depriving operators – including ourselves – of much-needed income. So, it was with great relief that at the end of the season we accepted two filming contracts, one for a US TV series and one for a UK programme. The first involved aviation scenes filmed at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, and all went very well.  We then flew straight to Inverness in Scotland, via Duxford, where we spent a day of water ops training on Loch Ness before filming the next day.

 Again, all went well until, at the end of the afternoon, upon re-start, the starboard engine failed to cooperate and the crew of captain Paul Warren Wilson, co-pilot Derek Head and myself as Crew Chief found themselves in the worst possible situation in a flying boat – adrift without power on a body of water with no obvious mooring or beaching places… and with dusk not too far away!  In due course, and in a re-run of the original Miss Pick Up’s situation (sans Me 262) we were rescued! The local Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) sent out a boat and managed to tow us to a mooring in Urquhart Bay on Loch Ness where, in pitch darkness, we managed to secure the Catalina for the night. They did a great job.
The old Canso operating on Loch Ness the day before the engine failure with Urquhart Castle in the background.
Derrek Rattray photo
Following the engine failure, the first part of the recovery operation takes place as seen through Gordon Menzies' lens.
Initially, a failed starter motor was diagnosed, but after replacement the engine still would not start, indicating something more serious that could not be rectified on the water. So, at this point, the costs started to accumulate. A very large crane was hired to lift the stricken Catalina onto a private quay in Urquhart Bay and in due course, possibly by the time this is read, our zero-time spare engine will have been transported up from Duxford and placed on the airframe. This engine had been intended as a replacement for our high-time port engine this winter – best laid plans that will now involve high cost in engine repairs and overhaul. We also need to replace the port one-piece blister transparency on the rear hull, which was unfortunately written off by a well-meaning skipper whose boat collided with our aircraft prior to the arrival of the RNLI.

 There is a determination to get Miss Pick Up fixed and flown back to Duxford despite the difficulties of Scotland’s winter weather and COVID-19 regulations but the equipment and infrastructure that needs to be in place is a massive drain on resources. Very early on, one of our shareholder pilots, Matt Dearden, set up a GoFundMe appeal and we have been absolutely amazed at the response from so many generous donors.  Indeed, our target will have been reached by now but sadly the repair and repatriation bill continues to rise.  More information may be found at https://www.gofundme.com/f/misspickup where regular updates on progress will be posted.  Another way to support us longer term is to join The Catalina Society – more details at https://www.catalina.org.uk/the-catalina-society-membership/

Let us all hope that by this time in 2021, the combined effects of the engine failure and Coronavirus will have been overcome and we will be looking back on another successful airshow season for this old RCAF Canso!

The author flies as one of the voluntary Crew Chiefs on Miss Pick Up and edits The Catalina Society’s journal The Catalina News.          
Click here to return to the Articles Archive.
Click here to check out The Catalina Society's website.