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Excellent as usual. Thank you for reminding us of our selflessness in those days, helping to get an ungrateful Europe back on its feet.

How Saunders-Roe with the Princess and Bristol (Brabazon) ever dreamed that their designs had a snowball's chance in hell of being commercially viable is beyond me. I hadn't heard of Aero Spaceline's interest in the Princess until now.

When I was a little, I remember seeing them at moorings in Southampton water while travelling to the Isle of Wight by ferry with my parents. I was very sad and intrigued. I couldn't understand the concept of obsolescence. It seemed such a waste. I suppose in retrospect the world had been transformed by WW2 and was changing too fast to predict the way things would be. SARO was eventually bought out by Westland and the site became the factory & HQ of the British Hovercraft Corporation where the huge SRN 4 car carrying Hovercraft were made. Looking at previous comments it seems that some people do not understand or respect the dilemma that rapid change creates in business. You cannot sit on your hands, you have to fare forward be it right or wrong. At least respect the creativity and technical expertise of those involved. Someone has to lead the world and attempt to show the way ahead. Don't forget that at that time transcontinental flight was in it's infancy and logically if you can't be sure you will make it across the oceans you need to be able land safely on them to be rescued.

Could you imagine the pilot(s) responding to ATC as “Go Ask Larry”.

The US plans to answer China's hi-speed train challenge with a system of hi-speed buses...

The Soham loco 7337 spent many years at Longmoor.

I can't imagine a plane this expensive was very popular with the public in austere post-war UK.

02:22 WHATS THIS ALL ABOUT !. You casually go through all the IC and turboprop engine options but you seemed to have missed this little modification. I had no idea they SR were even thinking of a Nuclear power concept which the American flew in 1956 with the Convair powered by a GE open cycle nuclear jet engines. Ooops, home goal, 17:54 Project P213

Leonard Lord. I wonder who he dined with. Was he ever a member of Chatham House or other supranational organizations? If I was to pose a thought experiment, how would you go about destroying the British motor industry over several decades?

I find it astonishing that we hear the conclusion that the failures were all down to bodged management. Nothing so apparently purposeful at the extinguishing of an entire industry can be called a bodge. Let’s face it. It was wholly intentional. Same with motorcycles.

wonderful interesting video , it never ceases to amaze me that model manufacturers just stick to common locomotives to manufacture as youve just shown there are rare and far more interesting models far more worhy of modelling

I saw them moored up when leaving Southampton on a ferry to France in the sixties

What were they thinking? Total waste of money, stubbornly ignoring the developments that happened during WW2.

The narrator sounds like Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot!

Someone fitted wings to the Michelin Man.

Splendid presentation.

The East Cowes site was amazing, How they built these behemoths down there never ceases to amaze me. I am pleased I worked down there before most of the site was cleared.

Saw it from my bedroom window when it was a small boy in Southampton

interesting thank you for the video.

I really love this video and the story it tells. There are not many stories from history that contain more 'well, duh' moments.

"These 'giant' airplanes are actually the last of the LITTLE airplanes. There is a need for great ocean airliners two to three times the size of these Clippers." A spokesman for Pan Am said those words before the Japanese militarists' attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii brought the U.S. into World War II, and that would hasten the trend away from flying boats and toward larger, land-based airplanes and ultimately towards the Jet Age.

Nothing ever changes in UK, Government and Civil Service messing with things they just do not understand. What appealed to me was the idea of changing the basic design to a cargo plane. Now that would have been some plane and a good replacement for the Beverly on many levels.. Typical waste of effort and money in the end.

The engines sound like a Antonov an 22

Good and informative, but a real voice would be an improvement.

I guess that plane has more powerful engines compared to the spruce goose that barley flew because of under powered engines

Oh for one of those magnificent wind tunnel models!

And now we are squashed into outdated 737 sardine cans! What progress! 😂

What a superb design the Westerns were.

On sheer scale and boldness, the Princess reminds me of the Russian Ekranoplan ground-effect plane. Another beautiful techno-dream fated never quite to be conjured into reality. Cost overruns, dithering governments, internal politics.

Still inventing ways of making sealing wax......Thanx for the vid, wanna try Boeing314. Brit connexion was Churchill's favorite mode of travel across the pond. Another vid is how thanks to Ultra, no 314 or troopship across the Atlantic was ever fired upon. That is staggering if you think about it.

But if I want something posh I want a Rolls Royce and not a Daimler. That's an end of this idea.

Britain was coverered in the scars of about 600 airfields/airbases during WW2, they doomed the flying boat. The 1945 Labour government should have dug up 90% of them and returned them to agriculture,

The fact that all three were scrapped for corrosion problems despite being cocooned does make you wonder what their airframe life would have been in commercial service. Modern airliners can now survive for 20+ years. I too saw them on Calshot spit as a boy.

Never was is not correct, it did fly!

Worked on Class 47's for many years at Immingham TMD ,great loco as as they keep their coolant in , very well researched video can't fault you on this

Great episode, fantastic detail, although sadly depressing, again demonstrating Britains out of step pace to the changing needs of the day. But what an amazing engineering feat.

Oh, I found this interesting: I was given to understand that one of the reasons for the demise of the flying boat was that the boat-shaped hull could not be pressurized, and that flying boats were therefore limited to flying at uneconomically low altitudes. The Saro Princess shows that pressurization was not impossible.

Such a magnificent engineering effort and for naught. The managers of the company just a little too stuck in the past.

Great video

Sorry guys, most of us don't really care about all the tech stuff.

A most interesting account, well done.

Please go back to voicing the videos yourself 🙏

what a sad story

Sad behemoths which answered questions nobody asked.

that mic is CLEAN niceeee

Typical of the British, sitting on their hands, in business as well as technology.

Sure was a pretty airframe.

Very well done. Thank you. As a child growing up in 1950's San Diego, California USA, I loved seeing the large Convair cargo seaplanes and the much smaller Albatross Coast Guard rescue seaplanes. I still picture my blue plastic toy with swing up nose, extending cargo ramp, spinning props, swing-down wing pontoons and military vehicles. 😊

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A most intriguing history of an ultimately misguided project.