ABOVE: The Hawaii Mars II in its element at Sproat Lake tanker base in Vancouver in July 2024, shortly before its final flight to the British Columbia Aviation Museum.
The 2008 Motion Fire had already scorched almost thirty thousand acres, and evacuation orders had been issued for towns throughout Shasta County, California. Swooping low and slow, a leviathan "water bomber" released tens of thousands of gallons of water into the flaming trees, then landed on Lake Shasta to reload and do it again. After a month-long battle, firefighters finally contained the Motion Fire just west of Redding. But this was only one of many wildfires that Hawaii Mars II helped extinguish in the forests of the US Pacific Northwest and Canada until it retired from service in 2016, seventy-eight years after it was built.
In its day, Hawaii Mars II was the world's largest operational "flying boat," pushing the limits of large aircraft engineering. How large? Imagine a flying tour bus with a two-hundred-foot wingspan. Imagine walking through the wing to change a part on an engine—while the aircraft is flying. Preflight inspections took hours and involved rowing a boat—one of several stored inside the aircraft—around the exterior. It took off from and landed on the water, although it could be hauled ashore with detachable wheels.
Hawaii Mars II was one of six JRM Martin Mars aircraft, designed as long-range patrol bombers to hunt enemy submarines during WWII. The Navy later converted them to transports, and in the last days of the war, Hawaii Mars II flew "blood runs" from San Francisco to Honolulu, carrying blood products for the wounded returning from the Pacific. The return flight to San Francisco could accommodate eighty-four on triple-decker stretchers, with mailbags occupying any spare space. Each Mars was named for the archipelago it served: Hawaii, the Philippines, the Caroline Islands, the Marshall Islands and the Mariana Islands. The original Hawaii Mars—the first one built—was lost in Chesapeake Bay during testing a few weeks after it was completed in 1945, and the Marshall Mars caught fire and sank off of Waikiki in 1950. The other four carried Navy cargo between Honolulu and San Francisco until 1956; of the original six, only the Hawaii Mars II and the Philippine Mars survive.
Hawaii Mars II was destined to be sold for scrap, but instead a Canadian company, Forest Industries Flying Tankers, repurposed it to fight wildfires. Its incredible lifting power and ability to scoop six thousand gallons into its internal tanks made it a formidable water bomber. Captain Bob Dyck flew Hawaii Mars II for six seasons in western Canada until it ceased operating; in its fifty-five years of firefighting, Hawaii Mars II dropped an estimated fifty million gallons, more than any other single firefighting aircraft in history. Dyck, an experienced water-bomber who'd been flying smaller planes in the Canadian wilderness, switched to the Mars after a serendipitous coffee break with the chief pilot of the Flying Firemen, one of the last aerial firefighting companies to own Hawaii Mars II.
"It was terribly underpowered," Dyck recalls. "You had to work to get it airborne." Despite four massive engines delivering a combined ten thousand horsepower, it had a power-to-weight ratio similar to that of an entry-level sport plane. The pilots had to plan ahead and use finesse, while the flight engineers tweaked the optimal settings for each engine. Flying it wasn't the only challenge: Taxiing the 120-foot-long, 162,000-pound craft from the landing zone to the mooring buoy "separated the men from the boys," Dyck says. One of its last missions was to train pilots to taxi the largest modern flying boat, the Chinese AG600 Kunlong.
Hawaii Mars II completed its last flight on August 14, 2024, landing in the waters near the British Columbia Aviation Museum in Sidney, British Columbia. It was paid due respect, escorted by the Snowbirds (the Royal Canadian Air Force's equivalent of the Blue Angels). From there it was trucked to the museum, where it will remain on permanent display as the "crown jewel" in the collection, says museum board president Steve Nichol.
"It's the best possible place for it," Dyck says wistfully. "It is hard to explain the intimacy a person can develop with an aircraft. The Mars was special and still is, even relegated to shore duty," Its sister ship, the Philippine Mars, will be donated to the Pima Air Museum in Tucson, Arizona.
