Flight Training - August 2012 - 40

WATER GEAR
Sure the regulations don’t require water survival gear, but do you really want the FAA dictating your safety? Be smart and carry the following for any overwater flights. • Life vest—don’t leave home without this one. They are relatively inexpensive, and many overwater pros wear them at all times when flying offshore. You just need to make sure one is available for everyone on board and they know how to use it. • Raft—The biggest challenge of bringing a raft is weight. But assuming you have the useful load, they are great to have. If you make one trip a year to the Bahamas, or across the Great Lakes, rent one instead of purchasing. Call AOPA’s Pilot Information Center for sources (800-USA-AOPA). • Signaling device—A mirror is great. But a portable emergency locator transmitter (ELT) is even better. Check any large pilot supply store for these high-powered, highly accurate position locators. They save lives. Other—Food, sunscreen, a handheld radio, and critical medications are all great to have, assuming you can get them out of the airplane in time.

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The only person I know to actually ditch is former colleague Amy Laboda. Amy is, how do you say, thorough. So naturally I expected her to brief her two pre-teen daughters and the nanny within an inch of their lives on handling an unintentional water landing in her Cessna 210. She made a game out of it with the kids, she says, which made it more fun for them and made them more engaged in the process. Here’s how it went: Have them open and close the doors and windows, locate the fire extinguisher and figure out how to use it; operate the seats, and find and operate each normal and emergency exit. She also had them put on the life vests, and demonstrate they could unbuckle their seatbelts eyes open or closed. You can imagine her encouraging the kids as they raced through the tasks. Anyway, one hot, muggy afternoon at the Key West airport, Amy loaded them in the back, sat a friend in the right seat (who got a briefer lecture inside the aircraft but still had to put on an inflatable life vest on takeoff like daughters and nanny), firewalled the 210, whereupon it parted with the runway, reached all of 1,500 feet, and then the engine went bang and died. She didn’t have time to do much more than broadcast the traditional Mayday shoutout, and tell the tower she couldn't make the runway, then run through the emergency ditching checklist she found she’d subconsciously memorized. The 210 was clean—no gear or flaps down. She hit the water and the 210 skipped, then buckled; out popped the windshield followed closely by Amy through an open door (once she unbuckled her seatbelt), followed by

daughters, nanny, and passenger out their exits on the right side. They surface, crawl into their life raft and Amy says they waited all of five minutes before the Coast Guard reached them. Aside from totaling the 210, and getting soaked, it’s a happy ending. And that’s how you perform the perfect water landing if you’re not flying an amphibian or a floatplane. As for me, Greco gave me pretty much the same briefing that Amy gave her kids, although Mayte didn’t make me inflate my Mae West. And we didn’t go down. From all this I have to say that ditching is pretty easy if you don’t have to think about it. Basically, first perform the same type of safety briefing on the ground used by the typical airline flight attendant and ignored by the jaded passenger: Show the exits (remember, the nearest exit may be behind you, like in Greco’s Cessna twin) the location of the safety flotation devices (provided there are any—the regulations state they’re required only if you’re flying for hire and out of sight of land); review the crash position—and make sure that they’re listening. Make sure the passenger next to any exit can wrestle it open, but anyone else can do it, too. If no one in the aircraft can, then that’s your job. Once you’re in the air, well out to sea, and going down, pull the nose up to slow to the best-angleof-glide speed and pop open the doors—once the airplane hits the water, the airframe might buckle and jam the doors and otherwise make egress tough. Contact ATC or switch to the emergency frequency—121.5—squawk 7700,

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Flight Training - August 2012

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