When you look at a fleet of nearly 60-year old airplanes flying a regular schedule while enduring the stresses of saltwater takeoffs and landings, you have to ask: "Is this any way to run an airline?" And the answer from the entire team at Chalk's Ocean Airways is a resounding: "You bet it is."

If there was any invention that perfectly combined all you would need to travel our planet, it is the flying boat. It delivers the speed of flight with the flexibility to land on any suitable body of water. Unfortunately, their reign over the world's air transportation was all too brief.

But, if you love flying boats as much as I do, you'll be thankful that there are still companies like Chalk's Ocean Airways around. As it has since its inception in 1919-that's right 1919-Chalk's still operates flying boats on scheduled flights between South Florida and the Caribbean. And while the airplanes themselves may be the airline's most visible asset, what goes on behind the scenes is truly a story worth telling.

"What we're really doing is running a modern airline with classic airplanes," explained Tracy Perkins, Chalk's director of maintenance. "And to successfully deliver the quality product our customers expect, our maintenance efforts have to go well above and beyond what an airline with new airplanes has to do. It's quite a challenge."

When you arrive at Chalks's operations and maintenance center you literally take a step back in time to a day when Grumman's Mallards were the ultimate in personal transportation. In fact, when you see one of their airplanes sans engines, it wouldn't take much to believe it was 1947 again.

And speaking of engines, those and the avionics are where Chalk's has made its biggest concessions to modern technology. "Frakes bought the rights to the airplane and created the turbine conversion package in the early '70s," Perkins said. "I believe ours were converted in the late '70s and have been providing reliable service ever since."

Switching from the wonderful Pratt & Whitney R-1340 Wasp radials not only saved the airline countless hours and dollars in maintenance, it netted each airplane another 1,400 pounds of useful load. "It's a nice gain when you're operating off water half the time," he added. "That's the ability to carry more passengers on each run."

But while switching to turbine engines may have saved on engine maintenance, it had little affect on the airframe's overall service demands. "Under the paint, these airplanes are vintage 1940s, and that means we have to take extra care in inspecting and maintaining each one daily," added Luis Carrillo, director of Chalk's repair station. "Because of that, our mechanics look at our three airplanes as personal possessions. Unlike another airline where you may not see the same airplane for months, we see ours every night."

Chalk's airplanes aren't the only thing that's old-fashioned about its approach. The company's mechanics-they prefer to be called mechanics and not technicians because as one of the Chalk's veterans put it, "mechanics fix things"-can't rely on modern diagnostics to find a problem. They have to rely on their own skills and experience and, something many modern airlines have forgotten about, an on-going dialog with the flight crews.

"Our pilots play a big role in our maintenance efforts," Perkins said. "The crews know when the seas are rough and the engines may have ingested some extra water. They tell us when something just feels different. And our mechanics know that I expect them to ask a lot of questions to narrow down exactly what's going on. I keep telling the guys, 'you can't fix it if you don't know exactly what it is.'"

Partially because of the age of the airplanes and the harsh environment they operate in, Chalk's has adopted a progressive inspection program. By dividing the routine program into six individual C-check inspections, it lets the mechanics get a good look at each aircraft on a consistent basis. "We fly 80 days between a scheduled check," Perkins said. "When an airplane comes in for a heavy C-check, that area in particular, and the rest of the airframe in general, gets a good going over."

By the time each aircraft has gone through all six checks, it has been completely overhauled. "It's normally completed over a 20-month period," he continued, "but the entire inspection is not to exceed that time."

Two of the areas that get particular attention during each of the C-checks are the fabric-covered control surfaces and the landing gear. The need to continually inspect the fabric-covered control surfaces is pretty obvious. The rudder and elevators live an especially harsh life. Both of them are mostly submerged during some part of water operations, and the saltwater can make short work of the aluminum skeleton if it penetrates the Ceconite covering. "We are probably the only scheduled airline where fabric covering is still a necessary skill," Perkins said proudly. "We thought about metalizing the rudder, but decided it would make it harder to inspect and repair."

The landing gear is the other area that gets lots of attention. "Most people have no idea of the importance of the landing gear to a big seaplane," he added.

One ride on a Chalk's flying boat and you'll see just how hard the landing gear works. The gear is kept down during many water operations to add stability and control. And the airplane's momentum combined with waves, wakes, and tides can put an enormous strain on the rather spindly looking supports.

"That's why we're in the practice of refurbishing the entire landing gear set at every C-check," Carrillo said. "It's a real good use of our time. We rely on them too much to take any chances."

But the inspection of the landing gear isn't only done during the scheduled C-checks. Each gear set is inspected, washed, and lubricated fully at the end of each day's operations as part of the airplane's "transit service."

While the gear inspection is rather routine, the daily service also includes the unique practice of setting the airplane on its tail to make sure all the water is drained out of the hull. Afterwards, the entire airplane is washed and every moving pin, hinge, and connector is lubricated. "If you miss just one, you'll hear about it the next day," Carrillo added.

The final step of each day's service is to wash inside the turbine engines with fresh water. "It's not just tap water," Perkins said. "We use a dedicated reverse-osmosis filtering system on the water supply so we don't introduce any minerals into the engine. We literally wash the engines with cleaner water than we drink."

As you would expect, being the caretakers of a fleet of classic flying boats does provide Chalk's maintenance team with some unique challenges. Like changing a tire out in the water. As Carrillo tells it, one of the airplanes had suffered a flat, so the crew couldn't taxi out of the water at the Miami seaplane base.

"You can't taxi up the ramp on a flat tire without damaging the landing gear," he explained. So Carrillo and a couple of the mechanics went down to Miami with a spare wheel and tire. The challenge was, they had to change the tire while the airplane was in the water, which meant the mechanics had to put on masks and snorkels to do the work underwater.

And, because the airplane was anchored off shore, they had to float their tools along with the tire out on a big piece of Styrofoam. "A tire and wheel is pretty heavy," he added. "And it doesn't float. If we would have dropped it, it would have been gone for good." Fortunately, the change went according to plan and soon the airplane was able to taxi up on land.

What is the biggest challenge facing Perkins, Carrillo, and the rest of Chalk's maintenance team? "It is definitely finding spare parts," Perkins said. "You just can't pick up the phone and find replacements for our airframes, and the ones you do find are probably in worse condition than what we're trying to replace."

So what do they do? They make the replacements themselves. Perkins said that Chalk's supplies an outside DER with either the original drawing from the parts manual or an example of the part they need. The engineer then redraws the part and supplies that along with a list of materials to Chalk's in-house machine shop, which will then fabricate it to the specifications. "We always make 12 of each part," he said. "Then they are heat-treated or whatever before being inspected and accepted into our inventory."

With the ability to create most airframe parts and with new engines and avionics, what does Perkins see for the future of Chalk's beloved flying boats? "Our airplanes work real hard," he said, "but they're taken real good care of. In fact, I don't think you'll find another airliner that receives more attention and care than we give ours.

"We give your airplanes the extra attention because we care about our pilots and passengers," Perkins continued. "In the morning when they're getting ready to leave, we send them off with: 'Have fun, be safe, and if you need us call,' with an emphasis on, 'if you need us, call.' We're here to help."