You’ve lost me. :confused:

Assuming I’ve got some grip on this, if there was a patent – there’d be evidence for certain. That’s how patents work. My point was simply that patents protect innovation, not that a pylon-wing arrangement would be possible to patent protect. I doubt it would.

A statement by a trade journal does not mean a manufacturer is avoiding certain patent criteria by playing with words.

My original gripe was with Roscoe Creed in his otherwise excellent book:

‘Where it’s predecessors has parasol wings held above the hull by a multitude of struts, the XP3Y-1’s [Model 28] parasol wing was set cleanly on a single pylon, and braced to the hull with only a single pair of struts per side. JUST HOW AND WHEN LADDON CAME UP WITH THE PYLON IDEA NO ONE KNOWS…”

All I originally said was that Consolidated used as a basis for the Model 28, the Sydney and the the idea of removing that myriad of struts they had previously been using, with a pylon (or as Flight put it – a conning tower!) and that Laddon did NOT come up with the pylon IDEA. SIMPLY THAT.

Whether there is a patent or not on the pylon idea is immaterial. You asked me for documentation to prove that Laddon used Blackburn’s idea of using a pylon and you stated he possibly thought of the same idea independently of Blackburn’s.

It’s obvious to anyone that it was already in use, whilst Consolidated were creating forests of struts under their wings and Roscoe Creed should have known this since he was a journalist and spent ‘years researching the famous flying boat’. Was he not aware of the existance of other flying boats?

He could have written – ‘…and braced to the hull with only one pair of struts per side. The pylon idea was already in use at that time by the British as it was an excellent compromise…’

From the langauge used by the staff writers of Flight in 1929, they were also aware of the use of a pylon to reduce the number of struts prior to the Nile. If Blackburn’s had thought of it they would have made a song and dance about ‘how clean our new British monoplane flying-boat is compared to the competition’ in the article.

I fail to see the difficulty you’re having with accepting the fact that the basic design of the Catalina – a flying boat with a pylon attatched to a single wing – was already in use and that Laddon did NOT come up with the idea>:confused: