This article was originally featured on Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com.
It is half past noon on a cool November day on an island in the Pacific Ocean, and I am learning what it is like to drown.
First there’s the shock—the rush of water as I am plunged into the drink, flipped upside down, and submerged about a meter under the surface. I’m churned and spun around, I can’t see, and I have about a minute to get free before I lose consciousness.
In my disoriented state, I fumble for an exit I know is there, but it eludes me. I’m seized with the fear that no one is coming to my rescue, and I panic. I later learn that doctors have identified the point of no return at a mere 87 seconds after your last breath, when you reflexively open your mouth, aspirate water, and start to drown. At last, my fingers locate a door handle. I unbuckle my seatbelt and swim to safety.
If this had been a real seaplane emergency, instead of a simulation in a mock cockpit in a heated swimming pool, odds are I would be dead. Seventy percent of fatalities in aircraft that crash into water in Canada are caused not by impact but by drowning. That deadly statistic—from the country’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB)—has brought me and 10 others to this motel in Victoria, British Columbia, for “underwater egress training,” a sort of boot camp in how to escape a sinking plane or helicopter. Seaplanes are, by definition, aircraft that can use water as a runway for take offs and landings. Perhaps the most common seaplanes are floatplanes, which have pontoons. My classmates are professional pilots, often at the controls of floatplanes, along with one healthcare worker who travels often by floatplane to remote communities. As of March 2023, all commercial floatplane pilots are legally required to take the training every three years.
We are led by Bryan Webster, known in seaplane circles as “Bry the Dunker Guy,” a veteran pilot who has already trained close to 10,000 individuals whose jobs involve either piloting seaplanes or flying on them frequently. Webster mixes practical advice with these Houdini-style escapades. Calling this drill a dunking is a bit of an understatement; it’s more like waterboarding. Anyone taking this one-day course undergoes it multiple times, and repetition is key. The idea is that people can learn to extricate themselves—and perhaps a few others—from what would otherwise be a watery grave. Webster says that of 31 pilots who have taken his course and were subsequently in a floatplane crash in water, all survived—a 100 percent success rate. These survivors also rescued 31 passengers, for a total of 62 lives saved.
I’m here for the immersive experience as a journalist, and to make the drenching authentic I wear pants, a sweater, and loafers, just as I would if this were a real flight. And as in real life, my initial instinct is to do all the wrong things. “The first thing most people do if they are in a crash of any vehicle is unbuckle their seatbelt, right?” Webster asks us. Do that in a crippled seaplane, though, and you could hit your head, collide with other occupants, or get stuck before you have a chance to get out. The rule here is to follow a four-step process, which we’re required to memorize: grab a door handle, open the exit while grasping onto a point outside the plane, then release your belt and grab a life vest, and inflate it once you’ve safely exited.
For many of my classmates, the course is a refresher. They spend their waking hours flying pint-sized planes adorned with pontoons and names like Beaver, Otter, and Goose to far-flung locations: north to Port Hardy at the tip of Vancouver Island, over to remote sites on the BC mainland, or farther afield in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories. Their clients aren’t just tourists or “rich Americans going duck hunting,” as one pilot in the class joked. On any given day, seaplanes in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest ferry a breadth of clients to the places they need to go—from wealthy tourists going on remote hunting trips, to blue-collar workers heading to fish farms or logging camps, to scientists visiting remote marine labs, to people who live off the road system and are trying to reach medical care in a city. For the pilots who make such travel possible, crashing is more than theoretical: they often fly solo to inaccessible places, “secret locations far from civilization,” as writer Ann Patchett described in a New Yorker piece on flying seaplanes around Alaska. The allure of this rugged lifestyle is undeniable. But therein lies the paradox: the same attributes that lend the seaplane an aura of romance also highlights its shortcomings as a modern form of transportation.
“Half-boat and half-airplane, but inherently suboptimal as both,” is how Robert Erdos, a test pilot for the US Navy, once described the essence of the floatplane, which “demands the skills of both a mariner and an aviator.” Many operate in the bush, connecting remote or isolated communities, and some date back to the 1950s or 1960s, often lacking modern tools like GPS and autopilot technology. The risks come from the fact that they land on water, and that in the rugged landscapes they routinely traverse—featuring mountains and large bodies of water—weather is unpredictable, tidal and surf conditions fluctuate, and hazards hide just below the water’s surface. To add to the danger, some seaplanes are equipped with wheels so they can land on terra firma as well. Therein lies another threat: if the landing gear—the wheels—isn’t in the right position for the surface, there may be no warning. And if a plane with its landing gear set for terrain lands on water, it will instantly flip over and sink, since the gear hits before the pontoons, which are intended to smooth the landing, in turn throwing off the plane’s aerodynamics.
Despite all this, what buoys this sliver of the aviation world is a subculture of proud floatplane pilots. Pockets of them persist in Alaska, Northern Ontario, the Caribbean, and, increasingly, the Maldives, which is by some measures the busiest floatplane market in the world, and a more laid-back one (where references to “barefoot pilots” are taken literally). For North America, though, the Pacific Northwest is seaplane central: BC-based Harbour Air Seaplanes, which bills itself as the largest all-seaplane company in North America, with 40 aircraft, carries more than 450,000 passengers around the southern coast of British Columbia alone every year. And that’s just one of several floatplane operators in the region.
The Pacific Northwest’s practical and cultural connection with seaplanes is fitting, because it is home to the Boeing factory, a cradle of modern aviation and the progenitor of today’s seaplanes. More than a century ago, a tiny seaplane made its debut 120 kilometers southeast of where we’re learning to survive a crash into water.
In Seattle, Washington, on June 15, 1916, a young man named William Boeing hopped into a rickety winged contraption made of spruce wood, steel wire, and linen fabric. Docked at Lake Union, the machine looked like a First World War biplane with pontoons for landing on water. It wasn’t the first seaplane ever built, but it was Boeing’s first aircraft.
Only a few of these “B&W” floatplanes—named for Boeing and his partner, naval aviator Conrad Westervelt—were built (a replica hangs at Seattle’s Museum of Flight). The company eventually built bigger seaplanes that could carry cargo and larger payloads. Rivals, such as upstate New York’s Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, also cranked out hundreds of seaplanes for private owners and navies around the world.
At first, amphibious craft that could land on water or hard terrain offered obvious advantages. They were faster than ships, capable of flying 84 kilometers per hour, and, given the lack of airports, in the event of an emergency it was easier to make a forced landing on water.
Soon a far grander iteration of the seaplane debuted: the “flying boat,” a yacht with wings. By the late 1930s, one of these—the Pan Am Clipper—was ferrying upward of 74 travelers across oceans in style, with lounges, dining rooms, and 36 sleeping berths for the well-heeled. Because its fuselage acted like a boat hull, it could land in any sheltered bay. The Clippers were luxurious, though slow: the flight from San Francisco to Honolulu took 19 hours, compared with under six hours today.
The Second World War changed aviation for good. The military needed long runways, so modern airfields appeared around major population centers, along with radar and air traffic control. Overall, landing on a hard, flat runway, with the technology to manage planes coming and going, turned out to be easier and more convenient than relying on sheltered bays scattered along coastlines. When Pan Am retired its fleet of flying boats in 1946, which at its peak totaled 28, pilots were happy to bid them adieu. “I argued daily for eliminating all flying boats,” one veteran pilot is quoted as saying.
The observation resonates today. Investment has steadily poured into commercial aviation, with advances in safety that have saved countless lives. The humble floatplane, to more jaundiced observers, is seemingly frozen in a 1950s time warp. But that appeals to a certain kind of pilot, one who prefers the friendly skies with a dose of thrill.
“So, I’m 17, well into my flight training, and I go for a ride with a family friend in a Cessna 150. And this fellow, he loved aerobatics, he was a bit of a risk-taker.” This is how Bryan Webster opens the classroom portion of his training sessions, and with a setup like that, you know it can’t end well.
The time is the late 1970s and the setting the Fraser River, which flows into the Strait of Georgia near Vancouver and is known for stunning scenery, strong currents, and—we soon learn—some unpredictable hazards in the air above. As Webster recounts how his joyride to nowhere turned into a flight from hell, it’s a catalog of almost everything that can go wrong when flying a small plane.
“The sun is setting as we’re coming back, it’s a very large glow of orange, and we’re heading directly for it,” Webster says. That drastically limits forward visibility, a serious problem since many small crafts fly under what’s called “visual flight rules”—a fancy way of saying you must rely on your eyes and your judgment instead of on the instruments that commercial pilots use. “You see, we pilots, we often fly low,” he deadpans. “It is not wise to fly low into the setting sun.”
Minutes from landing, as the plane descended to just 30 meters above the river’s surface, Webster spotted a cluster of power lines right in front of them. “I yelled at the top of my lungs, ‘Lines!’” The pilot attempted an aerobatic stunt to avoid the hazard, but, Webster continues, “here’s the fatal error: it was high tide. I knew when I saw that that we were going to hit water.” The plane slammed nose-down into the river at a speed of more than 160 kilometers per hour, generating an impact of around 20 G, or 20 times the force of gravity. The crash blew out the front windshield, and muddy water flooded the cockpit. “[It was] like having a fire hose put right in your face,” he says. Both men were knocked unconscious.
Webster came to as the water hit his nostrils. His unconscious friend hung upside down from seatbelt straps, bleeding profusely from the top of his head. Both suffered “extreme bruising” from the force of the crash, Webster says, and he learned then that not all seatbelts are the same. The Cessna featured secure five-point military-style harnesses. While such belts are more common now than they were in the 1970s, only single-strap belts are still required. “And that [five-point harness] is the only reason we survived this,” he says. But a safer seatbelt does not protect a survivor from a common obstacle to overcome in a floatplane crash: doors that often jam on impact and reduce the number of exits. Webster was lucky. The slam into the water blasted the doors off the cockpit. Webster got out, splashed over to the other side of the plane, dragged out his companion, put him in a chokehold, and swam to shore. The aircraft was totaled, but the pair was relatively unscathed.
Webster finished his training, got a license, and worked as a professional pilot for almost 20 years before he had another scare. One day in 1995, he briefly lost all engine power on one of his flights for a cargo airline. He was in a wheeled aircraft and landed safely at Vancouver Airport but wondered what he should have done had he crashed into the water. When he consulted his manual, he realized there was little useful information about what to do in that circumstance, which set him on a mission to raise awareness of how to survive a sinking plane. He launched his egress training courses in 1998.
By then, the dangers of seaplane travel had caught the attention of regulators in Canada, who were alarmed by the number of drownings in otherwise survivable crashes. A report from the TSB in 1994 concluded that most fatalities from accidents in water result from post-impact drownings, and those who did escape a sinking plane “experienced some difficulty in doing so.” The study also found that few occupants—even the pilots—took advantage of available shoulder harnesses, and without these restraints they were far more likely to be incapacitated by injuries and drown.
The TSB’s counterpart in the United States, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), has weighed in on the issue of seaplane safety several times, typically after a fatal accident. But the hard truth is that since most seaplanes typically can carry only a few people per flight, versus up 150 or more on an average narrow-body jet, there’s less impetus to prompt change if one does crash. That jibes with what insiders refer to as the “tombstone” philosophy in aviation safety policymaking, in which nothing happens until there are too many dead bodies to ignore.
In recent decades, though, several high-profile crashes have convinced aviation professionals that there’s more to be done to make seaplanes safer. In interviews, the experts I spoke with frequently referenced one of the worst seaplane crashes in Canadian history. The death toll was high, but it was the follow-up investigation that truly revealed the inadequacies of this form of travel.
It happened in November 2009, when a single-engine de Havilland Beaver, operated by Seair Seaplanes, crashed and sank in Lyall Harbour, off Saturna Island, between Vancouver Island and the BC mainland. A mother, the baby daughter she cradled on her lap, and four other passengers withstood the initial impact, only to drown because they were trapped inside the damaged cabin. The pilot and another passenger survived.
The tragedy shook the general public so thoroughly that the accident deeply undermined confidence in Canada’s floatplane industry. But what caused it? It was a classic chain of events seen often in aviation accidents, in which a series of seemingly unrelated errors line up in the worst possible way.
The TSB’s report detailed what went wrong: the plane was overloaded in the back end, making it more difficult to control. A strong wind propelled the plane toward a ridge, the pilot steered away, and the aircraft stalled. Unbeknownst to the pilot, the stall warning horn and lights weren’t working. The aircraft plunged into the water, and the seriously injured pilot couldn’t help passengers evacuate.
Thus began a prolonged back-and-forth between the TSB and Transport Canada over what should be required of the floatplane industry to prevent more loss of life. The investigation accelerated the push for egress training and a requirement that passengers wear lifejackets during the flight so they weren’t left groping for them in cold, dark waters after a crash. Both of those changes have taken effect in the last few years, over a decade after the Lyall Harbour crash.
But the vulnerability of the exits remains. The TSB investigation concluded that people aboard died because two of the four doors on the plane were jammed shut on impact. “Had all normal exits been usable or had there been other emergency exits, such as jettisonable windows, there would have been a greater chance of surviving the accident,” wrote TSB investigators.
Survivors’ families have since pushed for pop-out doors, a normal feature in many other airplane types. The TSB agreed, adding that to its list of recommended changes. But to become law, the recommendations must pass muster with Transport Canada, which, like the Federal Aviation Administration in the United States, also weighs other considerations, such as the economic impacts on the airline business. After consulting with experts, Transport Canada concluded that since planes would have to be redesigned and recertified, the cost of this recommendation was “too high” and did not justify the safety benefits.
Modernizing the fleet and regulations will go a long way toward protecting passengers and pilots—but no regulations can solve the deadliest problem in the Pacific Northwest: frigid water.
Wilderness guide Jenny Heap has firsthand experience with what happens when crash victims end up in a cold ocean. On the morning of September 30, 2016, Heap was kayaking solo in the San Juan Islands in Washington State. A heavy fog had descended over the region, but as she paddled near Lopez Island she noticed something odd in the distance. “I saw something bobbing on the surface, and I thought, ‘maybe it’s harbor seals’” she recalls. But then she heard someone yelling.
She had just stumbled on a seaplane crash.
There was no sign of the plane. When she reached the figures treading water, the tale came out: a Kenmore Air Beaver floatplane from Seattle had crashed just short of its destination on Lopez Island; the four people aboard—a pilot and three passengers—escaped but were disoriented. One man, the pilot, clung to a seat cushion. The others wore life jackets. Heap recognized the immediate danger of hypothermia: the cold water, about 10 ˚C, had sent the survivors into shock. In fact, they almost died before they were rescued by a coast guard vessel.
This accident barely attracted any notice at the time, since there were no fatalities. There was a brief probe in which it was determined that the pilot had been disoriented by the fog. But it highlighted a serious problem in floatplane safety that defies any simple solution: the inability to predict the weather and sea conditions.
“Unless you are in the Indian Ocean or some other tropical place, the water’s going to be cold,” says Gordon Giesbrecht, a retired University of Manitoba professor emeritus who is known as “Dr. Popsicle” for his studies of how to survive cold-water immersion emergencies—techniques he helped develop in a series of experiments using test subjects (including himself). He found that even when volunteers were dropped into water just above freezing—6 ˚C—hypothermia does not develop right away. It can take at least half an hour.
Giesbrecht came up with what he named the “1-10-1 Principle,” describing three critical phases of cold-water immersion. The first is cold shock, where you have one minute to stay calm and get control of your breathing. This is followed by a 10-minute phase, where you can still move and act to save yourself. And finally, hypothermia, a slow process that takes up to one hour to claim your consciousness. Knowing the phases may help delay its onset.
Webster teaches the phases and incorporates cold-water survival strategies into his training, emphasizing the urgency of huddling with fellow survivors and moving toward safety. But reality often plays out differently. In the 2016 Lopez Island crash, for example, the survivors were all close to shore. “But they had no idea where they were, because they were completely surrounded by a blanket of white fog,” said the survivors’ attorney. Had it not been for the chance encounter with a kayaker, their odds of survival would have been slim.
Despite the rare events that draw headlines, civil aviation is remarkably safe. Scheduled air travel is now enjoying its safest period in history, even with Boeing’s recent travails, due in large part to regulatory reforms and technological advances. In North America, the last major fatal accident on a commercial airline flight was in 2009, when a Continental commuter plane crashed outside of Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 aboard.
General aviation, which is a broader category of aviation, encompasses everything from sightseeing helicopters to small private planes. In Canada, while planes with floats have a higher fatality rate overall than planes on wheels, it’s tough to estimate accident rates, since seaplane operators are not required to report number of hours flown, and most operate for only six months a year. But hundreds of thousands of passengers take off every year in floatplanes and land safely.
Periodically, though, a string of mishaps will retrain the spotlight on seaplanes. In 2019, in a two-week period, three fatal seaplane crashes unfolded in quick succession in Alaska, killing a total of nine people and prompting the NTSB to issue a warning that seaplanes may no longer be a safe form of transport.
And then, on September 4, 2022, a de Havilland Canada Otter operated by Renton-based Friday Harbor Seaplanes abruptly plunged from the sky near Whidbey Island, Washington, killing all 10 people on board. Most crashes happen on takeoff and landing, but this accident occurred at cruising altitude, so there was no chance of survival, and no amount of egress training would have made any difference.
Although such accidents stoke the notion that seaplane travel is inherently risky, it’s still the only way to tie certain remote places together or connect them to the outside world. Plus, it’s a wonderful way to travel—as I learn the day before enduring my dunking at the hands of Bryan Webster.
It’s my first seaplane ride ever, and I’m grateful it wasn’t in the reverse order. I get to experience it as most fliers do, without thinking of all the things that can go wrong. I take off in clear skies from a dock on Seattle’s Lake Union for Victoria’s downtown harbor, in a 10-passenger Kenmore Air de Havilland Otter painted to resemble a killer whale. I’m on the milk run, a commuter service linking two city centers, and by cutting out the slog through commercial airports it’s the fastest route between the cities. For most of the one-hour flight, we’re barely above 600 meters, affording a close-up view of the scalloped coastline, with snowcapped mountains in the distance, and odd features like Dungeness Spit, a long, skinny sandbar that loops into the Juan de Fuca Strait from the Olympic Peninsula. I can understand why travelers gush about this experience.
I later learn that the plane I flew on was manufactured in 1954 (the cute paint job came a half-century later). Floatplanes can seem geriatric compared with commercial airline planes, but when this comes up in the egress training class, few of the pilots seem concerned. Several refer affectionately to flying the Grumman Goose, an aircraft that last rolled off the assembly line in the 1940s. Of the roughly 350 that were manufactured, 30 are still in service, including a number in Western Canada. Gord Jenkins, a seasoned commercial seaplane pilot in our class, says that “it’s not the age of the plane that matters, it’s how it is maintained.” And he would know—as a private pilot, he flies a Grumman Goose once owned by the Wall Street financier Robert Lehman, who in the 1940s used it to shuttle from his offices to his estate on Long Island. A California millionaire now owns the plane.
And though seaplanes are still manufactured, few observers expect the design to change drastically; the costs are just too high to justify the enormous investment required to overhaul an aircraft type that serves such a tiny niche. “Every few years you hear about some pretty good inventor coming up with some pretty good design for a new seaplane,” says Vance Hilderman, an aviation expert and CEO of AFuzion, an aerospace certification firm. “But the certification costs would be astronomical.” Although there is a futuristic all-electric “seaglider” in development in partnership with Alaska Airlines, and a few newer floatplane models, like the Caravan EX equipped with GPS and IFR (instrument flight rules), since older planes continue to function safely there’s less pressure to reinvent the wheel, he notes. Plus, Hilderman adds, many experts believe that since human error is a factor in many seaplane accidents, a better solution is to focus more on pilot training.
As Webster puts it, “You’ve always got to be on your game.” But it’s when the game puts you in the drink that you will really need the skills he pounds into us in this crash course in survival. While the atmosphere is at times jovial, there is a gnawing sense that this could be real someday. To survive really does take practice.
As an outside observer, whose chances of being in an underwater crash are exceedingly remote, I look back at my day in survival boot camp as both awe-inspiring and mortifying—especially after I fumble my way through another required underwater exercise in a bespoke tunnel meant to simulate an airplane cabin. I naively assume this will be the easier one, since I’m not upside down. Webster instructs us to descend into the water, swim forward into this contraption, feel your way to a door, open the handle, and slide out. But about 15 seconds in I have trouble finding a door, and with the clock ticking I flail around, hitting my fists against the faux side panels and ceiling. No longer able to hold my breath, I start ingesting water. Then, to my surprise—and that of the onlookers above—I free myself by blasting out through the flimsy top panel, which, in a real plane, would not be an option.
But perhaps if I were ever to be in an actual floatplane crash, whatever skills I gleaned from this ordeal would kick in. Months after I returned home, I connected with Tony McCormick, a Victoria-based marine safety entrepreneur who flies seaplanes as a means of commuting. He took his first egress training with Webster in 2006. “Of course, you never really believe you are going to need it,” he says. In 2015, in a freak accident, his tiny floatplane flipped over on Vancouver Island’s Lake Cowichan on a warm summer evening. It was harrowing. The force of the impact shattered the windshield, and water flooded the cockpit. In an instant, he says, he was upside down and almost three meters below the surface. “It could have been a failure of the pontoons, or an underwater hazard,” he says. “I will never know. But what I do know is the main reason I am alive and able to tell this story is that my training came back to me and overrode my urge to panic.”
Are seaplanes safe? Yes, especially if pilots take egress training and passengers know what to expect, ask the right questions, have adequate harnesses, and wear life vests. I’ll fly in a seaplane again, especially since I now know what to do if things don’t go well.
This article first appeared in Hakai Magazine and is republished here with permission.