The Seaplane Crash That Almost Killed Me

Despite my injuries, the fence still needed hopping, since the airplane I would soon be flying, a Glasair II kitplane, was on the other side of said fence. It was a pretty thing, the airplane, a white composite beauty with a nosewheel---the IIs look better as trikes, I've always thought---sitting in a grassy row with a couple dozen other Glasairs around it, back in the heyday of hot kits when OSH used to attract a lot of Glasairs.

And I know what you're thinking. While hopping fences today is frowned upon, and at some airports in some instances, the act might get you detained, or worse, at Oshkosh back in 1993, long before they called it AirVenture and nearly a decade before 9/11, nobody raised an eyebrow. And there were thousands of eyebrows around, as the brightly colored quilt of spectators stretched for a grassy half-mile in either direction as they waited for the real airshow to start in a couple of hours.

As for me, my distress wasn't just because of the pain. In some ways, in fact, the pain was the least of it. No, as I let myself down, gingerly, first one foot and then the other, as I faced the line of airplanes before me, I was confronted with the reality of it.

I was scared. For the first time in my life, I was afraid to go flying.

But, then, again, that's why I was there.

I'll admit up front that many of the little details have been lost in the friction of living and flying these intervening years. As I've been writing this, I've tried to remember and understand it all. The Technicolor details, sharp and bright even after all these years, the hazy parts, things I know I should remember, but don't really, and the parts that are a complete mystery to me. Have I forgotten because that's what happens to memories nearly a quarter of a century old? Or is my amnesia a result of the trauma, the product of my mind protecting itself from memories too painful to put on the mantle, to be confronted by every time I turn my head in that direction? In many ways, I wish I could forget the whole thing. Really forget it. Have it gone.

It's not gone, and the details that have fallen from my memory seem to do so at random. I don't, for instance, recall the name of the fellow I went flying with that sunny day at what was then known as Brennand Seaplane Base on Lake Winnebago, a short drive from the main airshow parking lot at Wittman Regional. I've forgiven him, though, at least I think I have.

At the time, I knew next to nothing about him. The folks from the kit company told me a little, that he was a customer and a relatively inexperienced seaplane pilot. Both of these things technically violated the rules I'd established for myself for doing demo flights. I knew there was risk in what I was doing, so I vowed to fly only with people I knew and whose skills I trusted, or with company pilots, who almost without exception flew smartly and safely, or at least skillfully. This guy was none of those things. Still, the folks from the company assured me that he was a safe pilot, and while he was new to flying off the water, he'd accrued nearly 50 hours in the SeaRey since he got it. I don't recall ever asking how much total experience he had.

It was my third Oshkosh---I've been to every one since---but it wasn't the first time I'd been to the Seaplane Base. I wasn't officially a seaplane pilot yet, but for not having that rating on the back of my certificate, I'd flown a bunch of seaplanes in my short flying career---Lake Amphibians, Kitfoxes on amphibious floats, a couple of ultralights on Full-Lotus inflatable floats, a Cessna 172 and a Champ on straight floats, among others. It was a motley and sporty group of planes, and in them I'd cobbled together maybe 50 hours of time and perhaps 150 landings. In retrospect, I probably had a good deal more experience than my demo pilot. I wish I'd had that information to work into the mix back then. If I'd have known, maybe I would have chosen not to go flying. I'll never know.

It was a beautiful day, though not a perfect day for seaplane flying. Let me set the stage: For those of you who've flown into Oshkosh, you know that Lake Winnebago is a big body of water, stretching north and south for 30 miles, with its widest sections a good 10 miles across. Brennand, now known simply as the EAA Seaplane Base, was where the water flying associated with the big annual airshow took place. 

It's important to understand the geography of the base. It is situated in a small cove on the lake, inside a little pass-through channel, just wide enough for a small plane to water-taxi through from a larger cove, known as Willow Harbor. That somewhat larger body of water is defined on its western edge by a narrow peninsula known as Streich Point, a strip of land no wider than a couple hundred feet. It's lined with large deciduous trees, elms and maples that rise more than 100 feet above the harbor's surface.

As happens with any large body of water when the wind picks up, the surface of the larger lake was starting to get a little choppy. The little inlet where the seaplane base is situated stayed mostly calm, with just a hint of ripples in the middle of the cove.

I met my seaplane customer/demo pilot, the one whose name I've forgotten, shook hands and thanked him for the opportunity to go flying with him. I've purposely refrained from doing any research on him, the wreck or the pretty seaplane he owned for a short time before it was totalled. My impression was, he seemed like a nice enough guy. That's all I recall, and if there were any signs that he was anxious about flying a short demo flight in an airplane that he was supposed to be proficient in, I missed every one of them. I've thought about it a lot since, and I wonder if I should have paid better attention. Were there hints he was nervous as we popped open the canopy and climbed into the side-by-side seating---I don't recall why I took the right seat; it was my preference to fly demos from the left seat. Maybe he didn't feel comfortable flying from the right. Was that a sign? Was his water-taxi out just beyond the edge of the harbor tentative? Did he seem to be vacillating? I've got a dozen more such questions and zero answers to any of them.

Like any airplane, a seaplane wants to take off into the wind. With an offshore breeze, that is, when the wind is blowing from the shore onto the lake, that means you need to be headed toward the shore. If the water on the main part of the lake had been calm, we could have taxied out for miles to get the room we needed for the takeoff run. But because the surface was getting choppy, we only went out so far as the water remained relatively smooth. This gave us a lot less room to accelerate, break water and climb. I don't know how much room we had in front of us, and I'm certain that he didn't, either. I'd bet he didn't have any idea how heavy we were or how much of a run, given the conditions, we would need to clear a 100-foot obstacle, in this case, a line of trees. I blithely assumed he had enough experience in the airplane to know that we had plenty of room to take off and clear that wall of trunks and limbs and branches.

The trees that line Streich Point and Willow Harbor are a critical part of the story. The smaller cove (which has no name, as far as I know) in which the seaplane base is located has much shorter trees surrounding it, by chance or by chainsaw I know not. But I did know then, though it didn't resonate with me, that planes taking off from the lake would more often than not pass right over the seaplane base. I thought at the time it was their way of showing off for the other seaplane pilots, and the truth was, we all loved it, as it gave us a chance to see the colorful floatplanes and flying boats roar by just overhead, water still dripping from them, shimmering in the sun.

I guess the beauty of it was the reason it didn't occur to me until some time later that these experienced seaplane pilots were taking that route out precisely because the trees around the base were much lower than the ones surrounding Willow Harbor.

I've thought a lot about the psychology of the whole thing. A few people have suggested to me that I should have seen the signs and called off the disaster before it happened. But I didn't, and I know they probably wouldn't have, either. It's common, I've come to realize, for passengers, even pilot-passengers, in small airplanes to suspend their concern as the door of the plane is closing. Even though it's probably not true, once the door is closed, the engine started and taxi begun, it seems a little late in the game to change your mind, or your fate. It's the way we're wired, not to speak up unless there's a big problem, and in many cases, we don't even do it then. In any case, there were no such red flags.

Such was my position. Canopy closed, the plane turned toward the shore, the throttle advanced, and we were off.

Bear in mind that the following chain of events lasted a very short while, around a minute or less, I figure. The individual details are like short moving photos, a few frames of motion in my memory interspersed with blank film. 

This is what happened. As we accelerated, the takeoff run started to concern me, and by then we were about halfway to the shore, toward the line of tall trees that loomed before us. Up on the step, we accelerated before finally breaking free of the surface tension, breaking water and beginning to climb. I didn't think about it at the time, but I wonder if the person to whom I'd just then entrusted my life knew what the speed was for best angle of climb in his new plane, because that was the speed we surely wanted, as it would give us the best climb performance over the short distance remaining.

It was at that precise moment that I realized it was going to be close. He had chosen, by default is my guess, to take off over the tallest trees, which just happened to be straight ahead. The lower line by the seaplane base would have required a slight turn to the left, and it required that he knew that such a turn would help, which he apparently didn't.

Instead, we were headed for the trees, and I had no idea if we'd make it. Surprisingly, instead of my head filling with images of us impacting the trees, with the subsequent dramatic and surely tragic consequences, I found my heart and head filling with optimism. I thought that we'd make it. It would be really damn close, but we'd clear those trees.

Then, by some miracle, I was no longer hoping we'd make it. I knew we would. For those of you who've flown too low over things that are too tall, you know there's a trick to knowing if you'll top that next ridge. If you can see rocks and trees at a level below the edge of the highest terrain in front of you, you're higher than that terrain. That said, if you have to use this trick, you're probably too low to begin with. And were we ever too low.

The point is, as we got close, really close, I could see, just barely, vegetation beyond the highest limbs we were fast approaching. We were going to clear the trees.

Unfortunately, between the two of us, I was the only one who realized we had it made. Instead of continuing to gain altitude and thus putting the trees behind us, literally and otherwise, at that precise moment, my guy did the unthinkable. He decided to turn back to the lake. I watched in horror as he initiated a steep banked turn and we immediately descended below the tree line. I wasn't watching him, but I knew he was terrified, reacting instinctively, and I was along for the ride, which was most likely the final one of my life. In a 70-degree bank, he kept the turn going, as our left wing cut through small branches that defined the very outside edge of the wall of trees he was attempting to stay inside, and mostly succeeding.

What I understand now that I didn't then was that we were in a high-speed stall. To his credit, he didn't pull the nose up as he was turning, so we retained some semblance of control. That said, we were still steeply banked, getting lower and faster, and the surface of the harbor, which we were fast approaching, was only getting closer, filling in the picture in the windscreen before us.

It was then that I screamed, screamed a phrase that, the NTSB will tell you off the record, is commonly heard on cockpit voice recorder tapes when the crew think that all is lost. In that moment I thought of my beautiful wife and precious child.

Then, as we were no more than 40 feet above the water, it became clear to me---and remember that these realizations were flashes and not reflections---that my pilot was locked up, that he was no longer actively flying the airplane. It was on me to save our lives.

I took control of the airplane, all the control that was available to me in those last seconds anyway, and leveled the wings. By doing that, I hoped to turn what was likely to be a fatal cartwheel at high speed into the lake into a survivable crash.

A split second later, we impacted the water hard, pancaking on the surface with tremendous force, slightly on my side of the plane. I remember nothing of the impact, except realizing in the immediate aftermath that I was alive, he was alive, and we were still floating. I looked back at the tail, which was mangled and misshapen, and the pylon for the engine, which the impact had deformed, bending it 20 degrees down and twisting it slightly to the side.

I was alive, and I was in great pain. All I wanted to do was get back to shore, a short distance away, and get help. Miraculously, the airplane was still floating, a credit to the plane's design, and at my urging, my part-time pilot taxied us back to shore, slowly. Once we reached the bank, a small crowd had assembled, and I was helped from the aircraft. My guy was completely fine. Not only had I saved his life, I kept him from the slightest injury.

He never thanked me, never even admitted that he had screwed up. Maybe that's why I don't recall his name.

The rest of the afternoon is a blur. In shock, I now realize, I drove myself back to the show, parked my car, hobbled over to the NTSB booth on the field, filled out a report and drove myself to the hospital.

That next day I went flying. I don't recall lowering myself into the cockpit of the little kit plane back at Wittman Field, but I must have, because I did indeed go flying, which I knew I had to do. And from start to finish, it was me at the controls.

I remember the takeoff roll vividly. As soon as I advanced the power in the Glasair and we began our takeoff acceleration, the fear was gone. The controls were smooth and quick, and as we rotated, I knew I'd made the right call. I'd never before or since appreciated being in the air more. I forget my demo pilot's name---honestly, I couldn't pick him out of a lineup---but he was the perfect flying buddy on that blue-sky, white puffy cloud day. As I maneuvered the little speedster around the clouds to a cruise on top and jotted a few notes, I knew that I was in the right place. I smiled at my flying companion, a smile he surely wasn't prepared to fully understand.

I kept that smile for a while as I banked the plane, carving my way through the pretty azure skies, and as I did, I thought again of my beautiful wife and precious little child.