File:Maia and Mercury (6105834384).jpg

Imperial Airways seaplanes at Foynes, Limerick.

On the bottom is Maia, with Mercury above. These planes were made by Short Brothers, and were aimed at solving the problem of getting heavily loaded aircraft into the air with a reasonably short take-off run.

On 20 July 1938, the Irish Independent reported: "The Mercury will carry across the Atlantic copies of tomorrow's "Irish Independent", which, if the flight proceeds as scheduled, will be on sale in New York at mid-day on Thursday. She will also carry half a ton of newspapers and pictures of the King's visit to Paris. ... The Mercury will be catapulated [sic] from the back of the mother plane, Maia, and it is hoped to make the crossing in about 12 hours [to Montreal] and to be in New York in under 20 hours."

Didn't realise that these two craft were part of a quite short-lived enterprise, but according to Bob Montgomery 2012: "the British Air Ministry, who had partially funded the experiments, decided there was no future in the project, and although Mercury was launched by Maia late in 1938 on two flights to Alexandria carrying Christmas mail, that was the end of the experiment."

And thanks to guliolopez for the rather sad news that neither plane survived WWII: "The S20 (smaller one - Mercury) was broken up at Rochester during WWII for its aluminium. The S21 (bigger one - Maia) was destroyed in an air raid at Poole also during WWII."

Date: 20 July 1938