Flying sailboats: five names sharing one word, and nothing else
"Flying" on a sailboat is not a brand — it is a prefix that at least five separate, unconnected lineages happen to share. The Flying Scot is an American one-design daysailer built by a single family-run company in Maryland. The Flying Fifteen is a British one-design keelboat class built to class rules by a succession of UK yards. The Flying Dutchman is a Dutch-designed Olympic racing dinghy raised to international competition by its own class organisation. A German yard, BWC Illmensee, builds an entirely separate FLYING range of small cabin cruisers and a school boat under its own name. And Flying Dutchman Yachts is a Taiwan-based cruising-sailboat brand that reused the Dutchman name for cabin cruisers with no connection to the Olympic dinghy. None of the five shares a designer, a builder, or a company history with any of the others; a buyer searching "Flying" is really choosing among five different boats.
Origins and ownership
Gordon "Sandy" Douglass, who also designed the Thistle and the Highlander, designed and built the Flying Scot in the late 1950s — the builder dates its company, the Gordon Douglass Boat Company, to 1957. Ownership changed hands twice: first to Eric and Mary Ammann, then in 1991 to Harry and Karen Carpenter, who renamed the company Flying Scot, Inc. and based it in Deer Park, Maryland. The Flying Scot Sailing Association's own materials describe a family succession under way, with the Carpenters' daughter Carrie and her husband Tyler having joined the team, and credit the class with more than 6,140 boats built. The association calls the Flying Scot one of the oldest and largest one-design classes in the world; it was inducted into the American Sailboat Hall of Fame in 1998.
The Flying Fifteen traces to a specific request: Jimmy Damant, a Commodore of the Island Sailing Club and an early International 14 owner, pressed Uffa Fox to design a boat as capable as the 14 but at least 18 feet long. Fox obliged in 1947, building the first hulls at his own Cowes yard. No single company carried the class forward — Medina Yacht Yard, Jack Holt, Chippendale & Wyatt, and Tormentor all built boats to class rules; Tormentor's No. 192, "Coweslip," was presented to the then-Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh as a wedding present.
The Flying Dutchman was designed in the Netherlands in the early 1950s by Uus Van Essen and Conrad Gulcher, who set it up deliberately as an open class — every hull built to the same basic rule, but innovation encouraged rather than restricted. That openness is how the Dutchman ended up bringing big-boat gear like roller furling, windward sheet travelers, and spinnaker chutes to dinghy racing. It served as an Olympic class for more than 30 years, and more than 10,000 have been built.
BWC Illmensee's FLYING range began under the yard's original name, Südplast, which put the first FLYING boats on the market in 1963; designer Heribert Streuer developed the FLYING yawls directly with the shipyard crew. The FLYING CRUISER followed from a Streuer sketch, and several thousand have been built in variants since 1967. The Cruiser Jolle and the daysailer Cruiser S were the fleet's flagships until 1982, when the Cruiser F family joined the range; its most recent iteration, the "model 2010," has been on the market since January 2009.
Flying Dutchman Yachts is a separate matter entirely, and its history stays apart from the Olympic dinghy's. Its cruisers were built in Taiwan by Ta Yang Yacht Building and credited to designer Eva Hollmann — known, per one boat-data source, for fast and unsinkable cruising designs — working with Willem Eickholt, a part-owner of the company at the time, who reportedly wanted an aft-cockpit, flush-decked cutter with a fin keel, skeg rudder, canoe stern, and clipper bow.
Construction through the eras
The Flying Scot has been fiberglass-built throughout its run, with a balsa-cored hull and deck, hand-laid chopped-strand mat and woven roving over a sprayed gelcoat finish coat — a construction Good Old Boat and SpinSheet both describe as producing a strong, stiff, if relatively heavy, boat. The Flying Fifteen started in wood: an eighth-inch diagonal inner skin under a Honduras mahogany outer skin, on a 285-pound hull carrying a 400-pound keel. Construction diversified over the following decades — carvel, moulded ply, aluminum, Tufnol, and eventually fiberglass — before recent Ovington-built boats settled on an epoxy foam sandwich with carbon in high-stress areas. The Flying Dutchman ran the same arc from a different starting point, moving from cold-molded wood to a carbon-and-Kevlar composite. BWC's FLYING boats, by contrast, have always been hand-laid GRP; the builder credits built-in buoyancy devices with making them unsinkable.
Lines and generations
The Flying Fifteen's production mould has passed through named builders in sequence, each stage documented by the class's own history: Roy Windibank's fibreglass moulds dominated from the early 1980s, with the mark IV winning the 1984 Worlds and six Nationals and being cloned for use in Ireland, South Africa, and Australia; the mark IX went on to Dave Ovington, who refaired it into the "Ovington Smoothie" and tightened construction tolerances in 1993; after a decade of production that mould gave way to the Ovington Mk 10, the class's current production mould. Beyond the four documented lineages above, the "Flying" name also turns up on a scattering of smaller one-design classes and catalog entries — among them the Flying Saucer, Eleven, Tern, Ant, Tramp, and Racer — with too little documented history available to place them confidently within any of the lineages above.
Who Flying is for
A buyer drawn to a Flying Scot wants a one-design racing daysailer built to unchanging class rules by one continuously operating American company. A Flying Fifteen buyer wants a UK-built one-design keelboat with an international racing circuit behind it. A Flying Dutchman buyer wants a former Olympic trapeze dinghy with a 70-plus-year competitive record. A buyer looking at BWC's FLYING range wants a small German-built cabin cruiser or school boat. And anyone considering a Flying Dutchman Yachts cruiser should treat it as its own Taiwan-built brand, sharing nothing with the Olympic dinghy but a name.
