Icon lands on water, news at 11

LOL The thought of hundreds of Californians dialing 911 on their jewel-encrusted cell phones as an amphibian airplane lands on water is just hilarious. :D

What is slightly disturbing is the response time by the alleged rescuers. Half an hour is a really long time to wait in a real emergency.
 
Idiots - I can just imagine the two people in the plane sitting on the wing, happy that so many people on the beach were impressed by their new toy.
 
BigBadLou said:
LOL The thought of hundreds of Californians dialing 911 on their jewel-encrusted cell phones as an amphibian airplane lands on water is just hilarious. :D

What is slightly disturbing is the response time by the alleged rescuers. Half an hour is a really long time to wait in a real emergency.
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Only one call was placed to 911 by a couple visiting from Texas.
 
Fortunate they got airborne before "rescuers" reached them, or there might be an attempt to make them pay for the response.
 
Wow there are planes that actually land on the water.
 
Scrabo said:
Idiots - I can just imagine the two people in the plane sitting on the wing, happy that so many people on the beach were impressed by their new toy.
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It's hard to impress people in Southern California. $300,000 sports cars, and $20millon dollar jets are everywhere.
 
True story-

The guy that is in the hangar directly across from my old hangar has very nice Cub Crafters Cub on floats. He told me he was moving the plane up to his place in Idaho and was thinking of getting something like a Mooney for down here. I asked him why.

Partly because of been there, done that here in California with more limited places to use a float plane, but a big part of it was he was getting sick of having the cops called on him every time he landed it somewhere. Apparently Californians don't seem to be aware that landing an airplane on water is legal and it's such a novelty here, that they freak out and call the authorities.

Once he took off from under the freeway bridge in Stockton and the FBI came calling on him! Apparently someone thought he was trying to crash his plane into the bridge. (Actually, the only violation here is a boating law. The water under this bridge is a 5mph no wake zone.) He says in Idaho, float planes are so common and people have a more live and let live attitude, so nobody freaks out about a plane on the water.

Whenever I'm out on the water with friends and somebody lands on the water, I usually get the question- "Can they do that?" I do my part to educate one boater at a time, yes, they can do that. It is legal to fly a plane on and off the water in most places.
 
It is not always so bad. We were returning from Idaho to my base on the Columbia River in Portland. We were trying to get through Dixie Pass in eastern Oregon.

But the weather wouldn't cooperate, so we landed on Unity Reservoir. Pretty soon there was a dust storm flying behind a pickup truck coming out to the crash site.

It turned out we were tying up the Cessna 185 seaplane just as the Hardy family arrived to rescue us. Good fortune too........because we ended up at their supper table!
 
This is why I like to operate more out in the backcountry, landing by folks is kinda fun, but it's not worth the Prius driving soft shoes types calling every three letter agency and PD they can think of.
 
America has been this way for over 20 years. Has ruined the utility of personally owned helicopters. Your aviation machine has to be compatible with the social environment you live in, sadly.
 
RalphInCA said:
It's hard to impress people in Southern California. $300,000 sports cars, and $20millon dollar jets are everywhere.
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Oh, I don't know. Most of them seem to be pretty impressed with themselves. They also seem to really let celebs impress them though a good portion of the US is the same in that regards.
 
kgruber said:
It is not always so bad. We were returning from Idaho to my base on the Columbia River in Portland. We were trying to get through Dixie Pass in eastern Oregon.

But the weather wouldn't cooperate, so we landed on Unity Reservoir. Pretty soon there was a dust storm flying behind a pickup truck coming out to the crash site.

It turned out we were tying up the Cessna 185 seaplane just as the Hardy family arrived to rescue us. Good fortune too........because we ended up at their supper table!
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Great story. That's the way things should work.
 
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