Seaplanes and flying boats have a rich and storied history that supported the development of aviation at a time when airports as we now know them did not exist. The first successfully powered seaplane flight occurred in 1910 in Marseilles, France just 7 years following the Wright Brothers first flight. Henri Fabre piloted an invention he called the Hydravion (French for seaplane/floatplane). Fabre’s aircraft was equipped with plywood floats that enabled the lightweight plane to take off from and land safely on water.

Seaplanes fall into two distinct categories, floatplane aircrafts and hull aircrafts or flying boats. Floatplanes are aircrafts that were originally designed as land airplanes that are provided buoyancy on the water by floats that are mounted under the aircraft’s fuselage by a matrix of struts and braces.