Does this then support the argument that you really dont need survival gear? We think not. At minimum, a personal flotation device for each occupant – plus an extra or two – is cheap insurance in any airplane, even those based in the landlocked desert. Although you may not fly any serious overwater legs, you’ll still have brief exposure over rivers, bays, lakes and along ocean shores. PFDs improve the already good odds of survival.
Obviously, you don’t need a survival suit to cross Long Island Sound but theres little question that a raft of some sort greatly improves survival odds. A raft does two important things: It gets the occupants out of the water, thus reducing hypothermia risk and it vastly improves the probability of detection when search and rescue comes looking.
The accident record is unclear on how long the typical rescue takes. Sometimes its mere minutes, other times hours or even overnight. One pilot drifted in his PFD for 25 hours near Hawaii after ditching a Grumman. Lucky for him his friends notified authorities, for he hadn’t filed a flight plan nor was he talking to ATC when his engine quit.
We found at least five accidents in which a raft or PFDs would have made the difference between surviving and not surviving.
One example occurred on September 11, 1987, when a Cherokee on an IFR flight plan ran out of gas and ditched into Long Island Sound. Both the pilot and passenger escaped uninjured and after a time in the water, the pilot decided to swim for shore while the passenger clung to an offshore structure. The pilot drowned and the passenger was rescued three hours later. There’s little question that a raft would have favorably altered this outcome.
There’s also a subtle wake up call here: Even for an airplane on an IFR flight plan, search and rescue may be slow in coming. That doesn’t appear to happen often, but it does happen. This argues for being prepared to provide for yourself, including equipment to remain afloat and to signal SAR when it does arrive. When you’re adrift in the water, you are on your own and it’s better to have too much survival gear than none at all.
One last comment on survival equipment: Its not sufficient to merely stow the stuff in the airplane and forget about it until its needed. A minimal safety briefing of some sort – just as the airlines do – is a must. An example of why this is so is illustrated by a bizarre accident which occurred in November of 1990, when a Cessna 172 pilot became disoriented off the Florida coast and ran out of fuel. He found a ship, circled it and ditched near it.
The Cessna was laudably equipped with both PFDs and a four-man liferaft. Unfortunately, one of the passengers inflated the raft inside the airplane, a calamity worse than the ditching itself. The passenger punctured the raft before exiting the airplane, thus rendering it useless. Furthermore, even though the flight was in distress, the pilot didn’t brief the occupants on PFD use and they were unable to find and don the vests. Two of the passengers survived, the pilot and another passenger died, although it’s unclear whether they drowned after egressing or went down with the airplane.
Myth: I Fly a Twin; I Don’t Need to Worry About Ditching Tell that to the pilots of 29 multi-engine airplanes that went into the water in the years we studied. These represent 16 percent of all the ditchings. Of course, many twin pilots shut one down over the water and make it safely to shore without bothering to report the incident.
One crude way of measuring the multi-engine ditching risk is to examine the total fleet numbers measured against reported accidents. According to the FAA, the GA fleet was composed of about 169,200 powered airplanes, as of 1997. That includes pistons, turboprops and jets but not gliders, lighter than air or experimental aircraft.
The vast majority – 85 percent – are single engine airplanes, the remaining 15 percent are multi- engine airplanes. At a glance, it would appear that multi-engine airplanes ditch at a rate equal to their representation in the overall aircraft population.
Of course, the flaw in this reasoning is that multi-engine pilots may – and probably do – fly over water more readily than do their single-engine brethren, reasoning that the extra engine gives them a safety edge. This would mean that their actual exposure to the overwater risk is greater as a group than it is for single-engine pilots.
47 Emergency Evacuations
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