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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 seaplane with wheels. This has the obvious advantage of flexibility but incurs penalties as well.
Any aircraft that can land on water will have to handle the extra drag and weight of the strong hull-shaped fuselage, or the floats (see seaplane), and the associated hardware. This leads, in turn, to the use of bigger more powerful engine(s) than comparable land aircraft, which in turn escalates weight or reduces range, or both. But once having paid this penalty, the added weight and drag of landing gear (which normally is retractable or, on smaller aircraft, semi-retractable) is minor today. While in the early days of aviation when good runways were not so common, flying boats and seaplanes were limited to water, the modern method is to include landing gear and make them amphibious.
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. The seaplane with floats has much shorter range due to the extra drag of the floats and structure connecting the floats and the airplane.
Few flying boats are manufactured today but numerous land aircraft are, each year, converted to amphibious-seaplane configuration 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), like 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.
See also
"Amphibious aircraft"