A TALL ORDER

The final flights of “Philippine Mars”– the last airworthy Martin JRM Mars flying boat

- BY JAN TEGLER

Standing 38 1/2 feet tall with a 200-foot wingspan, a 13 1/2-foot beam and 117 feet long nose to tail, Martin's JRM Mars was the largest Allied flying boat produced for World War II. Just seven of the mammoth seaplanes were built for the U.S. Navy between 1942 and 1947. But the impression they made on those who flew them, were transported by them or simply saw them over more than eight decades was as outsized as the aircraft themselves.

Mars Captain Peter Killin was one of them. He was seven years-old in 1960 when he first gazed at the Mars aircraft that had been acquired from American aircraft scrappers by a company in British Columbia, Canada called "Forest Industries Flying Tankers."

For just over a decade, the Mars fleet ferried cargo and personnel—including scores of sailors, soldiers, Marines, and airmen wounded during the Korean War—across the Pacific between Honolulu, Hawaii and their home station, NAS Alameda in San Francisco. Three years after the service beached them for good, FIFT purchased the four remaining flying boats in 1959 to convert them as the world's largest aerial firebombers.

Sixty-four years after first staring in wonder at the Mars, Killin was in the left seat of "Philippine Mars," the second production aircraft built, on December 15, 2024 crossing the U.S. Border on what was supposed to be its penultimate flight.

"We had flown down via Victoria and were just crossing the border over Port Townshend [Washington] when it blew a cylinder," Killin recalls.

"It was pretty exciting! It shot flames about six or eight feet out the front of the number 4 engine and black smoke over the wing. We had to shut it down immediately. We turned around and were heading back north to Port Alberni but we couldn't land because of fog. We ended up flying around Victoria for a couple hours until we got permission to use the [Canadian] Navy's barge tie-up on Patricia Bay."