Interesting video. I guess the question comes down to - was the pilot lucky or good?
Answer: Yes.
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It is very easy to question a pilot’s motives and decision making while sat in front of your PC with a cup of coffee in your hand. Also, the camera can do funny things to the depth of field…there may well have been lots of room, and the aircraft could be farther out than it looks in the video.
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Sorry but that was nuts! He went for the shallows to save the machine at the risk of swimmers he couldn’t possibly see. He rolled the dice and won. Doesn’t make it right.
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Absolutely. It is also too easy to say this went well, so the pilot must have done a good job.
Reality it is far more complex and sometimes the difference between success and failure is mere circumstance.
True, but looking at the pics @BeachAV8R posted, it sure looks like he sat it down with people on all sides… The pilot may or may not have been aware of the swimmers. Why he chose to land there, I don’t know. It may be that he realized too late, that there were people in the surf. He may have been down to two options, the sand or the surf, where the sand would definitely be a bad decision. Sort of caught between a rock and a hard place. Having your one and only engine quit sure gets your adrenaline pumping and making perfect decisions in those conditions isn’t easy.
In a way, yes. But when did he roll that dice? When he got in that cockpit? When he had the engine failure? When he realized the beach was his only option? Was the beach the only option?
There are a lot of things we don’t know about this incident.
It is a fair assumption that there was a lot of stress involved. Most people who care for their lives will try to save themselves, in situations like these. The safety of others comes second. It is only natural.
Is the guy trying to save his headset…?
Well, like I mentioned earlier, stress does wierd things to our brain and decision making processes.
This went well, because of, or in spite of, the pilots efforts.
I’ll be definitely watching the Blancolirio videos on that one.
It’s a fools game to post-judge a pilot’s decision under stress. In this case I am happy to play the fool. Another 50 yards out the chances of hitting a swimmer would be close to nil and the chances of recovering the plane easily would also have been nil. He made a choice that worked perfectly. I still believe it was the wrong choice.
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I think he was worried about drowning or getting caught in the cockpit and his lizard brain took over. NB: I don’t know what I’m talking about though, and just watched it the once. Great that no-one was hurt.
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That’s what I think as well.
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Exactly what I think as well. I mean, it’s not like he could save that headset from getting wet, anyway. Why did he take it with him? It’s not a rational action, because your inner lizard is not into rationalizing. At least that’s what I think is going on…
I take it as a sign that he is indeed fighting for his life.
Again, not critizism. It is perfectly normal behaviour. The image of the hero pilot that has ice running through his or hers veins, is mostly that. An image. We are all humans and we act accordingly. Some are trained to act in a certain way in a certain situation, but they are still humans.
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Yes, but no.
It’s a write off because the salt will just eat up this aircraft quickly. Normally they can withstand a certain amount of sea spray given that they are designed as naval planes but even then you have extra maintenance to expect. With a landing like this the salt water will ingress into every tiny crevice it can find. best you can do is dunk it in a tank and keep flushing it hoping you’ve got most out of it. Then strip the plane down to it’s components, take apart the frames, stringers, skin panels, what have you and attempt a rebuild.
Salt water is one of those things that causes everything to corrode. Quickly. Really really quickly. Especially if there is any type of power running through the thing.
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I am not qualified to criticise and I think the varying views already expressed show what a difficult situation it is to decide the right course of action, especially with the limited time available etc.
I’ll say one thing, though.
The pilot made a number of conscious decisions and risk assessments that day that lead him to that place: he got into a heritage airplane, made the flight plan, did the preflight checks, took off. As part of that risk assessment he had to accept a level of risk to his own life.
The swimmers did not get to do any of that risk assessment or decision making. To me, that’s an important point.
The outcome was great but there’s a question to be asked whether the risk to the lives of uninvolved people was sufficiently respected or if he should have landed further out - and if all reasonable care was taken in the planning to minimise the risk of having to use a public beach for ditching in case of an emergency.
I want to see old warbirds flying and I know they sometimes stop doing so unexpectedly: I still take every opportunity to see them fly whenever I can - I’m happy with that risk. That makes me a willing participant to the airshow and that to me is okay. It’s the risk to completely uninvolved people that happened here that I’m less sure about.
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I would imagine the distraction level on that airplane is kind of high!
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“Sterile cockpit”
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Like many here I recently bingewatched Netflix’s latest season of “Drive to Survive”. Occasionally they’d show old F1 footage of a car with the “Marlboro” logo on the spoiler. Seeing “Playboy” on a plane triggers a similar reaction in me. Like, “Oh yeah, that used to be a thing. The world is probably just as well off without it now.”
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I think they have sort of rebranded as more like a GQ type business from what I understand (or at least, that was the plan I think I had read about a year or so ago in some news article…MPMV (My Perception May Vary)) 
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I’ve never understood the whole playboy thing. It’s just so tacky. The whole lot of it.
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Funny how the world changes, yet doesn’t…Marlboro and Playboy are out, replaced by vaping, Instagram and Onlyfans.
I’m sure you could draw the same line to lewd hieroglyphs and whatever they smoked back in those times, heh…
From this side of the pond is came out of a different era, smoking jackets, Monroe and Love Grotto’s. It was something in tune with Americana, and the like. The articles used to be good as well, making it a more sophisticated way to look at tits. The UK didn’t really have that as boobs just used to be in the newspapers in that weird ‘this is normal’ way the tabloids did it then.
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