Engines optional

Surprise this is the first PBM image on DB, I guess the PBY is still the more popular plane.

I wonder if it's a reference to the famous rescue in the middle of the Ten-Go operation, where a PBM orbiting the battle waited until the remaining Japanese destroyers were too far away to interfere, and then landed between two large groupings of Japanese survivors from Yamato, hauled aboard one of the few American pilots downed during the attack, and took off again.

There's a (slightly dramatized, and incorrectly portrayed as the more famous PBY) rendition of it in the movie "The Great War of Archimedes".