A Honolulu man along with his father and son are mounting a three-generation effort to bring a working PBY Catalina flying boat and a bit of history to Hawaii for the 75th anniversary of the Dec. 7, 1941, attacks on Oahu.

John Sterling, a driving force behind the founding of the Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbor and a current board member, said he bought a PBY 6A in Spain and hopes to have a crew fly it toward Hawaii — possibly by way of England, Scotland, Iceland, Greenland and the West Coast — this summer.

The last leg might involve shipment on Matson, where Sterling works as a mechanic.

“That’s a key airplane for Pearl Harbor,” Sterling said. “I just took it upon myself to do this.”

The Waipio man — who is not a pilot — said he has been an aviation enthusiast since he was a boy. He owned an SNJ propeller fighter trainer that’s now in the aviation museum collection.

“I’ve been working on it (buying the PBY) for about a year,” Sterling said. “The negotiations on it involved Spain, Sweden and the U.S. It was a very complicated negotiation. But I just finished up the financial parts.”

The twin-engine PBY, with its long, Popsicle stick wing mounted high off the fuselage, is one of the most recognized aircraft in the world, according to the National Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Fla.

Used during World War II for submarine hunting, convoy escort, patrols, search and rescue, and cargo transport, the PBY was involved in almost every major operation during the war, the museum said.

PBYs were a signature aircraft in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941. “Hawaii was all about PBYs,” Sterling said.

Ray Panko, writing for the Pacific Aviation Museum, said a patrolling Catalina found a Japanese minisub off Pearl Harbor’s entrance at 7 a.m. Dec. 7, 1941, but by the end of the attack, of the 61 PBYs that were available on Oahu, all but 11 were destroyed or knocked out of action.

The aircraft figured prominently in photos of damage on Ford Island and at Naval Air Station Kaneohe Bay.

Sterling said his PBY, which was built in 1945, was used after the war for firefighting and was in France, Canada and Spain.

The plane was “about a month away from flying when the work ceased on it a couple years ago,” the 58-year-old Sterling said. His father, Thomas, 78, an aircraft mechanic and pilot, and son Allen, 24, are headed to Spain later this month to sort out remaining problems.

PBYs were used for search and rescue during the war “because we didn’t have helicopters, and they just kept going (after that) because they were so versatile,” Sterling said.

A privately owned PBY flew in the islands until an incident off Maui when it ended up sinking, he said. Records indicate a PBY-5A hit a partially submerged reef and was damaged beyond repair in 1986.

The University of Hawaii also had a PBY that was donated and stored on Ford Island with a bunch of parts until it was eventually sold, Sterling said.

Sterling plans to bring in a flight crew to possibly fly the plane back along the northern route.

“Basically, it’s retracing the steps that the United States initiated when we were ferrying airplanes for the war effort in Europe, (but) going the other way,” he said.

MATSON suggested that if and when he gets the plane to the West Coast, it could be shipped the rest of the way “and then just have it plopped in the water at Honolulu Harbor.” Sterling said he’s made arrangements before to ship planes for the aviation museum through Matson.

He’s looking at making stops around the Pacific with the PBY, and establishing a parking spot near the battleship Missouri.

“Because the PBY has range and if the engines are good, depending on just how things go and funding and things like that, I would like to be able to get it as far down to Midway or some of these key (battle sites),” he said. That could include Guam.

Sterling declined to say how much he paid for his PBY, but did offer that a fully refurbished model is being put up for sale for $3 million. He said he’d like to keep it in Hawaii for at least a while.

“I don’t want it to be a dead-end museum plane because it’s a fairly good plane for a flying plane,” Sterling said. “So if I could keep it here for a number of years and be able to operate it in and out of Pearl Harbor or wherever as a display, I would like to do that.”