STEHEKIN — All floatplanes designed to land on land and water have safeguards — usually more than one — to prevent the kind of landing that killed two people on Lake Chelan on Saturday, a pilot’s association says.
Stehekin School Superintendent Roberta Pitts, 67, and Dr. William Stifter, 64, died after a Chelan Airways floatplane flipped onto its back just after touching down at the Stehekin Landing boat docks. Numerous witnesses said the boat’s wheel landing gear were engaged as if the plane were landing on a runway, instead of pulled inside the floats as it normally would be for a water landing.
Mechanical and electronic signals and pilot training in which the pilot states out loud the position of the landing gear on each landing help prevent the wheels-on-water scenario.
Chelan County Sheriff Mike Harum said it’s believed that the protruding wheels caused the plane to nose-dive into the water, then flip upside down.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating and could take several weeks or longer to issue a finding on what caused the crash. An agency spokesman said this morning that the investigator is still in the area and has not issued a preliminary report.
Three escaped the submerged plane without serious injury, including Stifter’s wife, Patricia, 60; Stehekin resident Samantha Courtney, 16; and pilot Howard E. “Brick” Wellman, 61, of Cashmere.
A woman at Wellman’s residence said Wellman is not willing to talk about what happened at this time.
It is not yet known how much experience Wellman had as a floatplane pilot.
Chelan County sheriff’s Lt. Kent Sisson said passengers boarded the floatplane at the Chelan Airport. He said it’s his understanding that Chelan Airways previously used a floatplane that took off and landed on water only, and that the DeHavilland DHC-2 Beaver in Saturday’s accident was new to the company.
Chelan Airways was sold in March to principal owner Jeff Soehren and a group of investors that included Wellman, Tony Race and Chris Soehren, according to what new owners told The Wenatchee World in April.
Sisson said he also believes the Beaver was Chelan Airways’ only aircraft, and he assumes the company is not currently operating.
Jeff Soehren did not return calls Monday, and there was no answer at the airway’s office.
Pilots say there should have been some kind of warning system in the Beaver, a single-engine floatplane, to alert Wellman that the landing gear was down.
“All of them have some kind of safety device telling you when your gear is up and when it is down,” said Jim McManus, executive director of the Seaplane Pilots Association in Lakeland, Fla. “It’s because the wheels-down water landing is devastating. It happens so quick, and the pilot doesn’t know anything is wrong until the very last second.”
It’s serious enough that pilots are taught to state aloud the landing gear position each time they land, he noted. “No matter what course, they teach pilots that every single time they land, they say aloud, ‘This is a land landing, my wheels are down.’ Or, ‘This is a water landing, my wheels are up.’ “
J.J. Frey, an association board member and former executive of Edo Corp., which manufactures floats, said the floatplane industry has put a lot of effort into landing gear warning systems for amphibious crafts.
“The one thing we absolutely unconditionally guarantee is that if you land wheels-on-water, you will upset the seaplane,” he said. “It’s probably not a second to a second and a half before it’s laying on its back,” he added.
Frey said the Beaver was equipped with Wipline floats, which he called an “excellent manufacturer.” Almost all floats sold by Wipline have an audible warning system that comes on automatically when certain things such as the throttle and speed indicate the pilot is preparing to land.
A voice tells the pilot, in this case, that the wheels are down in preparation for landing on land, and the pilot must push a button that says ground landing before the voice will shut off, he said.
Frey said all floatplanes must have a light on the dash panel that shows the landing gear’s position.
And, he said, in addition to being trained to state aloud the landing gear’s position and whether the landing is on land or water, a pilot has a third, mechanical means of checking the landing gear in case of electrical failure, he said.
Some planes have a colored metal piece that will change from red to green when the landing gear position changes, he said. And in some seaplanes, the pilot can look in a rearview mirror on its wings to actually see whether the wheels are sticking out of the floats, he said.
Both Frey and McManus said all pilots who have flipped in a floatplane, or taken the training to get out of a plane cabin when they’ve flipped over and submerged, talk about disorientation.
McManus said those in the plane actually have to wait until the plane’s cabin is submerged to get the doors open, because the water pressure is too great as the plane is sinking. And being upside down is so disorienting, it’s difficult to get your seat belt off, or figure out which way to work the handle.
McManus also noted that seaplane pilots are specially rated and must go through flight review every two years.
Frey said the Beaver is a large seaplane, about 5,000 pounds gross weight, and most novice seaplane pilots would not fly one.
“Generally speaking, if you’re flying commercially, people probably want 500 or 1,000 hours of seaplane experience” before flying a Beaver, he said.
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