New! Sign up for our free email newsletter.
Reference Terms
from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seaplane

A seaplane is an aircraft designed to take off and land (correctly, though less commonly termed, "alight") upon water. There are two types of seaplane: the floatplane and the flying boat. A floatplane has slender pontoons mounted under the fuselage. Two floats are common, but many float planes of World War II had a single float under the main fuselage and two small floats on the wings. Only the "floats" of a floatplane normally come into contact with water. The fuselage remains above water. Some small land aircraft can be modified to become float planes. In a flying boat, the main source of buoyancy is the fuselage, which acts much like a ship's hull in the water. Most flying boats have small floats mounted on their wings to keep them stable. Seaplanes can only take off and land on water with little or no wave action and, like other aircraft, have trouble in extreme weather.

Related Stories
 


Matter & Energy News

February 23, 2026

Scientists may have spotted a long-sought triplet superconductor — a material that can transmit both electricity and electron spin with zero resistance. That ability could dramatically stabilize quantum computers while slashing their energy use. ...
Qubits, the heart of quantum computers, can change performance in fractions of a second — but until now, scientists couldn’t see it happening. Researchers at NBI have built a real-time monitoring system that tracks these rapid fluctuations about ...
Oxford researchers have found a way to visualize one of the most hidden — yet critical — components inside lithium-ion batteries. By tagging polymer binders with traceable markers, they revealed ...
Scientists have taken a major step toward mimicking nature’s tiniest gateways by creating ultra-small pores that rival the dimensions of biological ion channels—just a few atoms wide. The breakthrough opens new possibilities for single-molecule ...
Scientists at the University of New Hampshire have unleashed artificial intelligence to dramatically speed up the hunt for next-generation magnetic materials. By building a massive, searchable database of 67,573 magnetic compounds — including 25 ...
A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically ...
Ocean waves are a vast and steady source of renewable energy, but capturing their power efficiently has long frustrated engineers. A researcher at The University of Osaka has now explored a bold new approach: a gyroscopic wave energy converter that ...
Scientists have developed a new way to read the hidden states of Majorana qubits, which store information in paired quantum modes that resist noise. The results confirm their protected nature and show millisecond scale coherence, bringing robust ...
For the first time, researchers have shown that self-assembled phosphorus chains can host genuinely one-dimensional electron behavior. Using advanced imaging and spectroscopy techniques, they separated the signals from chains aligned in different ...
As data keeps exploding worldwide, scientists are racing to pack more information into smaller and smaller spaces — and a team at the University of Stuttgart may have just unlocked a powerful new trick. By slightly twisting ultra-thin layers of a ...
Scientists at HKUST have unveiled a major leap forward in calcium-ion battery technology, potentially opening the door to safer, more sustainable energy storage for everything from renewable power grids to electric vehicles. By designing a novel ...
Inspired by the shape-shifting skin of octopuses, Penn State researchers developed a smart hydrogel that can change appearance, texture, and shape on command. The material is programmed using a ...

Latest Headlines

updated 12:56 pm ET