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Interesting, although I would have thought that it was possible to do a better job of improving the quality, especially colour, in the digitising.
The Empire flying boats were the equivalent of the Sikorsky boats that were used slightly earlier initially for the Hawaii service, but were shorter range, being designed for the Imperial Airways and Qantas routes that had in turn been designed for short range aircraft such as the HP42 and DH86, and worked on the basis that anyone who could afford the airfare would want to sleep in a comfortable bed and not travel at night. This meant no more than about 1,000nm days, with one refuelling stop.
Significant differences from the Sikorsky included that the Empire boats needed to operate in a much wider array of environments, from a UK winter to wet season Darwin to summer Khartoum, and they were designed primarily to carry mail with passengers as an extra.
They were the immediate predecessor of the Sunderland military flying boat and were replaced in airline service after the war by sunderlands converted (or I think there were a few new builds) to Sandringhams. The original Empire boats were mostly lost during the war. Qantas had one shot down while in airline service off the coast of Timor, and another doing an evacuation flight from Batavia (Jakarta), two were lost on the water in an air raid on Broome, and I seem to remember all of the remaining ones ended up being impressed into the RAAF, or transferred back to BOAC after the London -Australia flights ceased. in 1942. None were returned to Qantas after the war - at least one crashed in Port Moresby in RAAF service.
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