An abdominal and passive damper was developed and installed on an established precision air bearing stage to overcome the defects of an aerostatic guide such as less transmission damp and easier susceptibility.The damper is consisted of a damping disk fixed in the bottom of aerostatic guide and an oil groove directly under the disk. The damping coefficient was obtained by recommended experiments,and an electromechanical control model of the air bearing stage was established to describe the influence of the damper on the positioning noise and dynamic characteristic of the stage. Numerical simulation results indicate that the stability margin and noise suppression degree become much bigger with increasing damping coefficient, while the dynamic response speed of the stage gets worse. Experimental results show that, based on the developed system and the same control parameters, the damp characteristics obtained by experiments agree with the theoretical results, and the damper with damping coefficient 293.78 N/m·s-1 suppresses the positioning noise of air bearing stage from 60 nm(pk-pk) to 20 nm(pk-pk). Furthermore, positioning resolution of the stage with damper is 20 nm. It proves that the developed damper can suppress the positioning noise of the air bearing stage effectively.