I read this story of the acquisition of a beautiful Seawind home built and thought the multiple dates on the accident headline must be a typo: which of them was correct?
Kudos to the pilot for telling the story.
This is a story and a half 
What I find amazing amazing is both the tenacity of the pilot and how many people helped him along the way.
If he was cat he would still have two lives more
It would appear he wrought total havoc along his way. Skipping paying his bill at the airfield where they really helped him, not good. Ditching in Lake Michigan when people have to come and save him, again not good. Not insured on a 100k aeroplane, defo not good.
An advert for GA? Not really.
BeechBaby wrote:
An advert for GA? Not really.
Well, if there was ever a story we could all agree epitomizes what we would not want GA to be, then it is this one.
Emir wrote:
If he was cat he would still have two lives more
Funny we have the same saying in Spanish
Capitaine wrote:
the tenacity of the pilot
Tenacity, yes, but it was focused on the wrong priority. This left quite a few items behind.
If it teaches something to me it is that as long as you are fighting and flying all the way to the end and do not give up, most crashes are survivable!
Antonio wrote:
Kudos to the pilot for telling the story.
Well you mean, because it is really a bad one?
I don’t know where to start, but this guy reminds me of Pluto from Micky Mouse. If the story is true. He really messed up with a beautiful plane. It’s a shame.
Because despite his shame, he decided to openly tell the story, so hopefully the rest of us can learn something
From what I read out of it he’s hoping to sell the story that a movie could be made out of it.
But it’s not really a story with elements from “outside”, with challenges or surprises. He forgot the landing gear twice. He ran out of fuel once. He made his first night landing in decades (hello proficiency!) in a plane he was not used to and which was not equipped for night flight, i.e. no landing light. He refused instructions and just took off. He made a water landing after several crashes and gear-up landings, and not once checked whether the overly mistreated hull was still watertight. So he probably would’ve sank even if he made a good landing with gear up. That’s not a story worth to be told in a movie, and there’s nothing to learn out of it as far as I see.
@antonio thanks for posting the article.
I actually had trouble believing half of it. But the reports are there, and good witness accounts are to be read. So, it happened, movie or not. What if he had landed at any stage on a school bus, a boat on the lake with unsuspecting family on board, would we be so relaxed about him?
Frankly a jail term may be in order…rather than a call from his publisher. One last point. He threw away 100k, destroyed a perfectly good aircraft, and gave the feds and FAA enough ammunition to damage the whole GA flight scene.There was also a pretty tragic BN2 accident on Beaver Island last week and we had this clown careering about the skys…and surviving mmmm
Antonio wrote:
Funny we have the same saying in Spanish
I’ve learned from my Spanish colleagues that, effectively, Spain is leading the world in the number of its sayings and the quality of its swearing.
