If you hang around floatplane bases in the Pacific Northwest or British Columbia you’ll see a bizarre sight. When it comes time for a floatplane to be retrieved or launched, a half-size pickup truck comes out of nowhere to do the job. It’s a visual that can break your brain, but there’s a good reason they exist.
Chances are you’ve seen trucks like these before on social media. Two of the more well-known operators of these floatplane trucks are Seair Seaplanes and Harbour Air. Both of these airlines have sites in Vancouver and their equipment frequently shows up online. I’ve been asking these companies for further details well over a year. Sadly, neither company has ever returned my contacts. The biggest question I’ve had since at least early 2023 is simply why.
Despite not getting a response, I’ve refused to give up and have done my own research. Here’s why you may see goofy partial trucks driving around seaplane bases.
Getting Work Done
Floatplanes are great aircraft because they don’t really need a runway. Can you find a large enough body of water? Great! Your floatplane now has a runway. Before the end of World War II, seaplanes, both flying boats and floatplanes, enjoyed dominance in the sky. It was easier to get passengers and goods around when a land-based runway wasn’t a required part of infrastructure.
Seaplanes lost their edge after the war, but they still serve vital roles today getting people and cargo to places where there aren’t land runways. For example, seaplanes are still a pretty big deal in the Alaskan and Canadian wilderness. They’re also just fantastic aircraft that you may want to own privately.
Some seaplanes are amphibious aircraft, opening up an entire world of possibilities of places to set down, while others are strictly stuck to touching down on water or soft grass. However, you may still need to remove your floatplane from the water for maintenance, repairs, or to hangar it for the winter. But how do you do that when your aircraft doesn’t have wheels?
That’s where ground support equipment comes in. Maintenance shops working with floatplanes often have trailers with a central hydraulic lift designed to elevate the aircraft’s floats above the tarmac. Some of these trailers are even simpler than that.
Check out these photos from the seaplane services offered by Elite Air Service in Michigan. This company’s floatplane trailer doesn’t look much different than the trailer you may use for a pontoon boat.
The next question is how to move the aircraft around once it’s on the trailer. As you can see, Elite Air Service just hooks the trailer up to a John Deere. I’ve also seen some operations use regular, unmodified pickup trucks. Some pilots also call this equipment “beaching gear.”
Floatplane trailers have one more additional benefit that has nothing to do with storage or maintenance. If your floatplane is at an airport nowhere near water, the truck towing the trailer can drive down the runway while you throttle up the aircraft. Once the wings generate enough lift, the aircraft simply takes off from the trailer.
The operators out west do things a bit differently. They’re still using trailers, but these trailers aren’t independent units. Instead, at the very end you’ll find a chopped-up pickup truck. These trucks range from classic to recent, but they all do about the same thing.
The Floatplane Truck
For decades, seaplane operations out west from Vancouver to Renton have used these strange trucks to haul floatplanes out of water and around a base.
From what I have been able to find, these trucks are made by mating a custom floatplane trailer to a truck. The donor truck is a 4×4 and it gets chopped from the cab back. The transmission is then modified to be locked into four-wheel-drive and the truck is mated to the trailer.
You’re probably wondering where the fuel tank goes in all of this, and the fuel tank is now in a box ahead of what used to be the truck’s front bumper. Sometimes the bed is shortened to just a couple of feet and the tank hides out in there. The truck also controls the hydraulic system, which sends a pair of rails up and under the aircraft, lifting it out of the water.
While I have not been able to find a detailed history of these trucks to explain their existence, I have found a reasonable explanation for why they appear to exist. By attaching a truck to the trailer, these floatplane beaching rigs become a lot like a forklift.
The rails, which need to be aligned under the aircraft, are in front of the truck’s driver, aiding in their approach to pick up the floatplane. The truck, which is hanging off of the back of its now sole remaining axle, then has enough traction to pull the floatplane up the ramp, where the driver will turn around, get any necessary ground clearances, and then drive the floatplane to its destination.
All of this is happening in plain view of the driver. Another benefit seems to come from the fact that the driver doesn’t have to worry about trying to back up or align a trailer when the truck and trailer are one whole vehicle. One quirk I noticed is the fact that the steering is inverted. Turning the steering wheel right while moving forward turns the rig left and vice versa.
Floatplane trucks appear to have been built out of all sorts of discarded vehicles from squarebody Chevy trucks to even an Oldsmobile Toronado. The latter makes a ton of sense since that car is already a burly V8 and front-wheel-drive, requiring no 4×4 trickery to do the job.
These trucks make sense for their operators because they never really need to be road vehicles ever again. Instead, they can hone in on their one job for the entirety of their working careers. So, that’s why these goofy-looking things exist. These once-whole trucks now serve an important job of extricating floatplanes from water.
Still, there’s information I do not know and have not been able to figure out over more than a year now. Who builds these trucks? Are they cheaper than alternatives? Who was the first person to come up with this idea? What happens when these trucks are no longer useful? I tried to get these answers from Seair and Harbour Air without any luck.
Still, I’m dying to know. If you have any more information for me, please send me an email at mercedes@theautopian.com.
These are trippy…I love the Squarebody w/ flames…the Toronado one is crazy…looks like it’s about to scrape the ground
Ahhh, the short lived cab rearward design trend.
When I was in my teens, a nearby auto salvage yard had a Pinto that was cut in half behind the B-pillar. The operator sat in it, started it up, put it in 2nd gear, and the driveshaft operated an aluminum can shredder.
It was a really cool innovation in a redneck-do-it-yourself kind of way..
My head hurts looking at those trucks!
Tired: Flying Car
Wired: Flying Boat
I love that they mount the rear bumper.
such a good completionist detail.
Lately I’ve been begging my wife (mostly unseriously, but it’s a fun dream) to let me get my pilot’s license, sell everything, buy a Grumman Widgeon, and live/travel in that. She does not share this dream with me.
We can dream together.
My dream plane was a Grumman Goose, but that’s all based on how damn cool they look. Now you’ve made me Google the Widgeon, and it looks just as cool.
Goose, Widgeon, Mallard, Albatross… they’re all awesome.
If we are dreaming big, I want a Dornier Do X.
Dream bigger. Get a new Viking DCH-515 and have them remove all the firefighting stuff and make it a badass living & travel quarters.
I really, really, want a Conwing L-16.
Same, but with a PBY Catalina/Landseaire.
Oh hell yes. Catalina & a pilots license is a lottery win thing for me.
Nah, what hou want is a Short Solent Mark III Flying Boat! The Oakland Aviation Museum has one you can visit. Their ex-BOAC Solent III, later owned by Howard Hughes appears in raiders of the lost ark dressed up as a Boeing.
https://www.oaklandaviationmuseum.org/aircraft-on-display
Lots of other cool stuff there too!
I don’t deny that’s seriously cool, Hugh, but I’m all about the bubble windows on the PBY.
Did she say “That sounds like a bunch of Bologna!!!”
“These trucks make sense for their operators because they never really need to be road vehicles ever again.”
Yet the white truck in the lede image is wearing a license plate on its rear bumper. I can’t imagine these are ever operated where that would be necessary, maybe if Seair ever gets back to you they can clear that up, too.
The maintenance hangars for Harbour Air and Seair are across a road from the boat ramp, so the authorities probably make them plate the trucks.
Must be an interesting experience when you take this thing in for an emissions test! Like it presumably uses the FWD tester, but it’s really more like the rear wheels actually driving.
By that, I mean they’re unlikely to ever be used as a true road vehicle again, like a vehicle you or I might use. 🙂 I have seen videos of these trucks driving across roads to get fuel or to get to a hangar or whatever, so they’re definitely street-legal enough.
A reader has also informed me that many of these trucks were either wrecked or just totally worn out before they became floatplane trucks, so their new jobs repurpose vehicles that would otherwise have been discarded. That’s neat!
They are not road worthy. They are hell to manoeuvre at the drive through and they are only single cab. All pickups must be crew cab or your kids will die if you take them somewhere. DUH!
Sounds like it’s time for a visit to the fabulous Pacific Northwest! There’s these gizmos, the Harbour Air electric float plane, linear-inductive SkyTrains, the JDM scene, the WWU Vehicle Research Institute in Bellingham, Sol Duc Hot Springs (which aren’t automotive, but are relaxing) and a bunch of aviation and automotive museums!
LeMay Collections at Marymount in Tacoma is worth a visit.
Not sure if the Model T driving school is still in operation though. Hope so. What an experience, not an easy car to drive.
I hope so! WAAAM’s Model T driving classes are already booked up for the year. I want to go to the WAAAM fly-in though. Lots of antique and interesting planes I hear.
They go farther south than Renton, I’ve seen them at a small bay on the OR coast too, over 20 years ago. Most of those were FWD cars, from sub-compacts to the downsized Eldo/Toro/Riv. They seemed privately owned as several were parked with their planes, or boats on them, and a few were lined up empty. A big reason, there at least, was maneuverability as it was a very small and tight place.
Now that I have a little more time. We were talking about Renton, 4×4 trucks that were cut off at the cab and turned into FWD and the biggest Eldos being mated with a trailer, I’ve got 3. I lived in Renton for a number of years not that far from the lake/airport.
Related to a 4×4 truck cut in half to make a very specialized FWD truck but not Renton. I saw in a 60’s Popular Mechanics a small article about a MD International 4×4 truck who’s frame was cut at the cab. The frame they built on the back was designed to straddle a shipping container or similar cargo, lift it up and drive off. It too used some sort of independent axles to keep the center of the vehicle clear.
Between the King Co shops, Boeing, and suppliers, there’s a lot of mechanical ingenuity around there. I sure do miss Boeing Surplus.
Yeah I miss Boeing, well the “old Boeing” not the one that MD purchased with Boeing’s money and the good old surplus store I purchased a few things before they closed it down. I have purchased a few things since as they now use Ehli Auctions to dispose of surplus items. I do drive by the old surplus store fairly often as the warehouse for the non-profit I’m involved with is near by.
We differentiate between trunk and frunk. Are these technically frailers?
These are important questions people!
Maybe they could be called leaders and not trailers.
Well, since it’s not detachable anymore, I’d say it becomes a rear-control truck.
This is quality internet, right here.
While at my daughter’s place with my 13yo grandkid, we had some time when the kid needed a break from school and such. We took a ferry from Seattle to Victoria BC, were able to get lunch and wander around for a couple of hours. I had purchased a couple of art prints there over 40 years ago and found the gallery and was able to talk the folks there to learn that the artists were still active. And then the highlight and point of the journey, the return flight on a float plane! Nice weather, clear skies, smooth drama-free trip all around. Float planes are great! I love flying, so it was a nice highlight.
I was lucky enough to fly Chalk’s from Miami to Bimini before they shut the airline down. It’s definitely a thrill to take off from a runway, land in the water, and be on the plane as it trundles up the ramp on land to the “terminal” (which was just a one-room building next to the water). I think we may have pulled our own luggage from the cargo area. Seaplanes are amazing.
The cover photo is Adrian‘s favorite configuration of all the GMT 400 body styles. I know it!
My theory is somebody cobbled one together from a wrecked truck, somebody else saw it and so on
Yeah, I sort of wonder if it started out that 4wd trucks with rusted out frames were reasonably abundant and cheap out there.
kenmore air operates seaplanes out of Seattle, never seen anything like these things!
Fun fact for the day:
YVR airport has a floatplane dock. You can transfer from a flight from over the pacific onto a seaplane.
Can confirm. Did a transfer from the other direction (YYZ to the Sunshine Coast) and it was sweet. The restaurant at the floatplane dock also has surprisingly good appetizers.
Doubt it. They got these for half off.
So they *are* cheaper than the alternatives. “They” refers to these trucks in that rhetorical question, as made clear by the preceding statement.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It was a half-assed effort.
Still more ass than these trucks have.
I see what you did there