Amphibious aircraft
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An amphibious or amphibian aircraft is an aircraft that can land on either land or water. An amphibian is a flying boat or floatplane with wheels. This has the obvious advantage of flexibility but incurs penalties as well.
Any aircraft which lands on water, if an amphibious version is required, will have to handle the extra weight and complexity of retractable wheels. (An example of this is the PBY Catalina, a flying boat. Only later versions were amphibious.)
Similarly an aircraft which lands on the ground, if an amphibious version is required, will have to handle the extra drag and weight of floats. It is most unusual for a land based aircraft to have a fuselage which can be modified and strengthened to land on water. Amphibious aircraft which are based originally on land aircraft are usually not flying boats, therefore, but float planes.
In both cases, therefore, there are performance penalties associated with creating an amphibious aircraft.
Amphibian aircraft have their uses, not least as transport aircraft in remote areas, where there are few airstrips but plenty of lakes and rivers. And they are more versatile than normal seaplanes and flying boats as they can be flown to a big airport or any suitable airfield to get service, or to just to be able to land or take-off when high winds makes the waves too big to handle.
By necessity amphibian aircraft are heavier, more complex and more expensive to buy and run than comparable landplanes but they are very versatile. And yet, on the whole, are cheaper to buy and operate, and simpler, than helicopters that compete for the same types of jobs, if not quite as versatile. Amphibious aircraft have longer range than a comparable helicopter because an aircraft's wing is more efficient than a helicopter's lifting rotor.
The flying boat-style amphibian can have nearly the range of land-only airplanes[citation needed]. The seaplane with floats has much shorter range due to the extra drag of the floats and structure connecting the floats and the airplane.[citation needed]
Few flying boats are manufactured today but numerous land aircraft are, each year, converted to seaplanes (or amphibious aircraft) by exchanging their fixed landing gear for (amphibious) floats. A handful of manufacturers around the world still produce amphibian aircraft (flying boats with retractable landing gear), such as the Bombardier 415 and Lake Aircraft and the ultralight SeaMax but their numbers are dwindling.
There are also several experimental/kit amphibians like the Glass Goose and the Seawind.
