AutoFlight, the Chinese eVTOL maker backed by battery giant CATL, has unveiled something that honestly looks like it was pulled straight out of a sci-fi movie: a floating airport for air taxis. Yes, literally a vertiport that sits on water — ocean, lake, river, wherever you want — and operates on its own without needing to plug into anything on land.
The company is calling it an eVTOL Water Vertiport, but the idea is pretty simple. It’s a modular platform that acts as both a landing pad and a charging point for electric aircraft. The whole thing is powered by solar panels and its own energy storage system, so it can essentially run independently once deployed. AutoFlight says it can drop these platforms pretty much anywhere, from busy coastal areas to far-off offshore zones, thanks to built-in comms equipment and an automated dispatch setup.
What the company really seems to be pushing is a future where you don’t have one or two of these pads, but clusters of them — what it calls a “Sea-Air Super Hub.” In theory, that could support everything from emergency response missions to maintaining offshore wind farms and oil rigs. AutoFlight claims response times for rescue operations could be cut in half, while routine offshore maintenance could speed up by as much as 10×. And in cities, these floating pads could give air taxis direct shortcuts across harbors or wide rivers without relying on crowded airports or dedicated land-based infrastructure.
AutoFlight isn’t some early-stage startup testing the waters, either. The company already has orders for more than 2,000 aircraft across cargo, passenger, rescue, and firefighting roles. CATL — which has poured hundreds of millions into the project — is also working on dedicated aviation batteries and even future “condensed batteries” that could eventually support electric aircraft flying over 2,000 miles on a single charge.
Put all of that together, and this floating vertiport starts to feel less like a publicity stunt and more like the first piece of a bigger plan. If AutoFlight and CATL can actually make this ecosystem work, we may be looking at a new kind of coastal and offshore transportation where aircraft don’t just lift off from land — they take off from the water itself.
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