A multi-modular floating airport is composed of several floating modules which are connected by flexible connectors. This paper presents the control of surge motions of the floating airport that is deployed in a lagoon in order to improve the stability and operation conditions. A nonlinear modelbased MIMO control method is proposed to suppress surge motions of a multimodular floating airport. The network modeling method is used to build the mathematical model of the controlled floating airport. Considering the saturation of actuator output, the backtepping method combining with an auxiliary system is introduced to derive the control law for the actuators. To verify the feasibility and efficiency of the method, numerical simulation is carried out in comparison with PID control algorithm.