A B.C. pilot now has a remarkable survival story to tell after ditching his small plane in the ocean off the Baja Peninsula.
Mike MacDonald had been hired to fly over the Gulf of California with a marine biologist to look for wildlife last weekend.
“Our job is to go out there and spot the animals, identify them, mark them, mark their location, and which direction they’re headed,” he told Global News.
But about three hours into a four-hour tour, his engine suddenly quit and he realized he couldn’t make it to land.
“My colleague there thought I was playing some sick prank, but nope, this was the real deal and we had less than three minutes to prepare,” MacDonald told Global News.
After a few minutes of troubleshooting, he realized he was going to have to ditch the plane into severe swells a long way from shore.
“According to the app that we use for our tracking, it says that we were 61 knots, which works out to about 113 km/h when you hit the water,” MacDonald added.
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“And it was a very sudden stop in fairly large swells with a little bit of white caps and some wind involved.”
He said that as soon as they hit the water, they unbuckled their seatbelts, rolled out, rolled the airplane over and had to inflate their life vests. While his partner’s inflated with little trouble, MacDonald said he had to blow his up manually.
“Luckily I’m a bagpiper, so it wasn’t too hard to do,” he joked.
Luckily, other than some cuts and bruising, both of them were OK.
“It just felt like a sea monster reached up and grabbed us and pulled us in and slammed us forward,” MacDonald said of the impact.
“So it was a kind of a bizarre feeling.”
The tracking app registered an impact and rescue personnel were being dispatched.
The pair floated in the ocean for more than two hours before the first vessel arrived.
One of the items that floated free of the wreckage was a marine radio and the pair used it to guide the first vessel to arrive, which was a diving charter boat, to their location.
Marine rescue arrived after that and the pair were whisked to La Paz for treatment for minor injuries.
MacDonald said his training and a sense of duty to his colleague kept him so calm during this emergency situation.
“If it was just me, maybe I would have been in a different headspace, absolutely, but I felt completely responsible for her, and I had to make sure that she got out of it in one piece,” he added.
MacDonald lost his passport in the wreckage but after meeting with crash investigators he will return home when he gets his new document.
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