Chapter Three · Airboat History
The Machine That Changed the Glades
Nothing under the water. That is the whole trick.
An airboat is a flat-bottomed hull pushed by an aircraft-style propeller spinning in open air. With no propeller or rudder below the waterline, it can skim across inches of water, over sawgrass and through marsh where an ordinary outboard would foul in a few yards. For hunters, frog-giggers, researchers, wildlife officers and, later, visitors, it opened country that had been reachable only by pole, canoe or foot.
Waterline shown dashed. Select a part to read how it works.
1 Engine
Mounted high and aft, behind the driver. Early builders used surplus aircraft engines; automotive V-8s later became common because they were cheaper and easier to service.
2 Propeller
An aircraft-type propeller pushes air, not water, backward. That thrust drives the hull forward — which is why the boat can run where there is barely any water at all.
3 Prop cage
The round steel guard around the propeller keeps hands, branches, birds and gear out of the blades. It is the airboat’s signature silhouette.
4 Rudders
Tall vertical rudders sit in the propeller’s blast, above the water. Turning them redirects the airflow and swings the stern. With no brakes and no reverse on most boats, the driver steers and slows by reading wind, water and momentum.
5 Hull
Flat, wide and shallow-draft — aluminum or fiberglass on most modern boats. A flat bottom lets the boat plane across the surface and slide over wet grass and mud.
6 Driver position
The driver sits high, in front of the engine, to see over the sawgrass and spot shallows, wildlife and other boats. A control stick works the rudders; a foot pedal works the throttle.
Sources disagree
Who built the first airboat?
Popular histories most often credit Alexander Graham Bell’s team, which experimented with a propeller-driven craft in Nova Scotia around 1905, and aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss, who is said to have built an air-driven boat for hunting in Florida around 1920. By the 1940s, Florida builders were turning them out commercially. We have not yet confirmed these accounts against primary sources, so we present them as the commonly told version — not the final word.
What we are researching
- Early patents and newspaper accounts of air-propelled boats in Florida
- The shift from aircraft engines to automotive engines
- Airboats in wildlife management, research and law enforcement
- The families and builders who made South Florida an airboat capital
Have photographs, patents, catalogs or first-hand memories of early airboats? Contribute to the archive.