Historic Planes Draw Crowds At Paris Air Show

SLOBODAN LEKIC

LE BOURGET, France (AP) — Nearly hidden among the ranks of giant airliners, military airlifters and sleek warplanes on display at this year's centenary Paris Air Show, an eclectic collection of historic aircraft has been drawing large crowds of curious onlookers.

Its centerpiece is the Bleriot XI, a rickety monoplane that was featured in the inaugural Paris air show in 1909, after its French constructor Louis Bleriot had used it for the first flight across the English Channel.

Drawing even more attention at the show — open to the public through Sunday — was the PBY5A Catalina, a beautifully designed U.S. World War II-era flying boat, stuck ignominiously between a massive Air France Cargo Boeing 777 and a brand new Eurofighter Typhoon multi-role fighter-bomber.

The high-winged twin-piston engine Catalina performed a variety of vital but unglamorous duties such as long-range reconnaissance, anti-submarine patrols and air-sea rescue of downed airmen or sailors from sunken ships. It even maintained the only long-range aerial link with Australia while that nation was cut off by the Japanese Pacific fleet.

In the type's most famous combat action, a British Catalina located the Nazi super-battleship Bismarck in the north Atlantic in May 1941. That sent an allied fleet in pursuit, and the pride of Hitler's navy was attacked and sunk.