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.
