Seaplane Air Taxis: The Airlines That Land on Water

Picture the arrivals hall at Malé. You’ve just stepped off a long-haul flight, and instead of a bus to the hotel there’s a short ride round the airport to a wooden jetty. Bobbing at the end of it is a little red-and-white plane standing on two long floats. Twenty minutes later it skims down into a turquoise lagoon, taxis up to a floating platform, and a boat from your resort is waiting.

That’s a seaplane air taxi, and it’s one of the oldest ideas in aviation that never quite went away. Wherever there are islands, fjords, lakes or harbours but not much flat land, an aircraft that uses the water as its runway still makes more sense than building an airport. Here’s how these little networks work, and where you can still fly on one.

Three kinds of plane that land on water

People use “seaplane” for all of them, but there are really three families. A floatplane is an ordinary aircraft that stands on two floats (often called pontoons) instead of wheels. Almost every air taxi you’ll fly on today is one. A flying boat is different: the body of the plane is itself a boat-shaped hull that sits in the water. Those were the giants of the 1930s. And an amphibian can use both water and an ordinary runway, usually because small wheels fold down out of the floats.

That last trick matters more than it sounds. An amphibian can start a trip at a normal airport, with customs and fuel, and finish it on a lagoon or a harbour. That’s exactly how several of the networks below are built.

How a plane gets off the water

Water is far draggier than air. When a floatplane starts its take-off run, the floats push through the water like the hull of a heavy boat, and spray flies everywhere. The trick is to get the floats up and skimming on top of the water, the way a speedboat lifts and planes once it gets going.

Floats have a small notch partway along the bottom, called the step. As speed builds, the pilot holds the nose at an angle that lets the float ride on the short section just ahead of the step. Pilots call this being “on the step”. With less float touching the water, drag drops sharply, the plane speeds up quickly, and soon the wings carry it off the surface.

Here’s the surprising part: the hardest water to fly from is the calmest. On perfectly still, mirror-like “glassy” water, surface tension makes the floats cling, so pilots sometimes lift one float out first to break the suction. Landing is worse. With no ripples to look at, the water gives no sense of height, and pilots have flown into it believing they were still well above it. So the standard technique, taught in the FAA’s seaplane handbook, is not to judge the flare at all. The pilot sets a shallow, steady descent with a little power and simply waits for the floats to touch.

Choppy water brings its own problems: waves batter the floats and can throw the plane back into the air too early. That’s why seaplane schedules live and die by the weather and the sea state, not just the clock.

The Maldives: an airline built around arrivals

No place on Earth uses seaplanes like the Maldives. The country is a scatter of coral atolls, and many resorts sit on islands far too small for a runway. So the resorts’ front door is the lagoon. Trans Maldivian Airways (TMA) says it flies 65 de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otters on floats, which makes it the largest seaplane operation in the world.

Everything starts at Velana International Airport in Malé, which has its own water aerodrome on the other side of the airport island. And the network doesn’t work like a normal airline. There’s no fixed timetable. Each day the routes are built around which international flights are landing and which resorts those passengers are heading to, so one Twin Otter might drop guests at three different lagoons before coming home.

The flying is strictly daytime, under visual flight rules. If your international flight lands after mid-afternoon, you may spend a night near Malé before your seaplane. Resorts even plan their water villas around the planes, leaving clear water in the lagoon so the Twin Otters can land and take off whatever the season.

Vancouver: a seaplane commute between two downtowns

In British Columbia, seaplanes aren’t a holiday treat. They’re how people get to work. Harbour Air, North America’s largest seaplane airline, carries around half a million passengers a year on roughly 30,000 flights. Its best-known route links Vancouver’s harbour with Victoria’s Inner Harbour on Vancouver Island, downtown to downtown, with no airport security queue at either end. Other routes reach Nanaimo, Whistler, Tofino, Salt Spring Island, the Sunshine Coast, Comox and Seattle.

The workhorse is the six-passenger DHC-2 Beaver, a bush plane first built in 1947, alongside larger Otters and Twin Otters. Harbour Air is also the airline trying to make seaplanes electric. On 10 December 2019 it flew a Beaver fitted with a 750-horsepower magniX electric motor instead of its piston engine, widely reported as the first flight of an all-electric commercial aircraft. Turning that prototype into a certified passenger plane has been slow, though. Regulators wanted new safety analysis for a single electric motor, and the target for certification has slipped to around 2026–27. When we last checked, it wasn’t yet carrying paying passengers.

Seattle: from a lumber-mill site to Lake Union

Just south of the border, Kenmore Air began on 21 March 1946 with one small Aeronca seaplane and a hangar on the site of an old lumber mill at the north end of Lake Washington. Its founders were three friends: Bob Munro, Reginald Collins and Jack Mines. Today the airline flies scheduled and charter seaplane services from Lake Union, right beside downtown Seattle, to the San Juan Islands and southern British Columbia, with landplanes at Boeing Field too.

Watching a Kenmore Beaver land between the houseboats and office blocks on Lake Union is one of the great free aviation shows in America.

Alaska: where floatplanes are just transport

In much of Alaska there are no roads at all, and lakes are everywhere. That’s why Lake Hood Seaplane Base, next to Anchorage’s international airport, is generally called the busiest seaplane base in the world, averaging around 190 flights a day in season. It has its own control tower. In winter the lake freezes and planes swap their floats for skis.

Florida and the Bahamas: amphibians to the islands

Tropic Ocean Airways, based in Fort Lauderdale, shows why amphibians are so useful. Its Cessna Caravans can leave a normal airport, or the Miami Seaplane Base on Watson Island, and land in the clear water off Bimini or other Bahamian islands. The airline even flies supplies out to yachts at sea.

Sydney: the harbour that was once an international airport

Before long concrete runways, the biggest airliners in the world were flying boats, and harbours were their airports. Sydney’s Rose Bay was officially opened on 4 August 1938 as Rose Bay Water Airport, Australia’s first international airport. It was the end of the line for the Empire flying boats run by Qantas and Britain’s Imperial Airways, and a trip to Southampton took more than a week, with around thirty stops along the way. Qantas flew its last flying boat out of Rose Bay in 1955, after landplanes and runways had taken over.

The seaplanes never fully left, though. Sydney Seaplanes now flies Beavers and Caravans from Rose Bay to waterside restaurants like Cottage Point and on scenic flights over the harbour, from the same stretch of water.

The networks that struggle

Seaplanes are hard businesses. Salt water corrodes airframes, weather cancels flights, and small planes carry few passengers to share the costs. Scotland learned this the hard way. In August 2007, Loch Lomond Seaplanes launched scheduled flights from the River Clyde, beside the Glasgow Science Centre, to Oban. It was Europe’s first city-centre seaplane service, and the first seaplane on the Clyde in more than 60 years. The company ceased trading on 11 April 2025.

Greece looks like perfect seaplane country, with thousands of islands, and for years there’s been a plan to link them with a network of licensed “water airports”. Hellenic Seaplanes has collected dozens of water-aerodrome licences and a permit for charter flights, but as of early 2026 it was still working with the regulator on approval for scheduled services. In Japan, Setouchi SEAPLANES started sightseeing flights over the islands of the Seto Inland Sea in 2016, the country’s first commercial seaplane operation in about 50 years.

Why the seaplane refuses to die

A runway costs a fortune to build and takes up land that islands, lakes and mountain coasts don’t have. A floating jetty costs almost nothing. That simple trade is why a design like the Beaver, older than most of the people flying in it, still earns its living every day. And if Harbour Air’s electric Beaver eventually gets certified, the short, quiet hops these airlines fly could be the first place battery-powered flying becomes ordinary.

If you ever get the chance, take the window seat. Watching the floats break free of the water, with spray streaming off them, is something no airliner can give you.

Sources & Further Reading

• Trans Maldivian Airways — Twin Otter fleet ↗
• Seaplane operations at Velana International Airport’s water aerodrome — ICAO information paper (2023) ↗
• Harbour Air — Wikipedia ↗
• Certification issues delay Harbour Air’s eBeaver debut — ch-aviation ↗
• Kenmore Air — Wikipedia ↗
• Lake Hood Seaplane Base — Wikipedia ↗
• Tropic Ocean Airways — Wikipedia ↗
• Flying boats: Sydney’s golden age of aviation — Museums of History NSW ↗
• Loch Lomond Seaplanes — Wikipedia ↗
• Hellenic Seaplanes secures 30 more water licences — Greek City Times (Feb 2026) ↗
• Seaplane tour operator opens in Hiroshima — TTG Asia ↗
• Seaplane, Skiplane, and Float/Ski Equipped Helicopter Operations Handbook (FAA-H-8083-23) ↗