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I’m sure it’s must be tempting to try it out and sea what your new boat plane is capable of. But an airplane was made to fly, not swim. 🏊 It’s like buying a shiny new 4wd pickup with a beautiful paint job and then deciding “hey, let’s cut through the woods and see if the stump jumper works.”
I gave a presentation earlier this year for the EAA Homebuilt Week, where I presented the fleet accident rate for various homebuilt types. The Searey came out at about 1% of the fleet having an accident every year, vs. the ~0.70% average for the overall homebuilts.
However, fully *half* of the Searey accidents involved water operations…leaving the gear down for a water landing, encountering boat wakes or sunken logs, etc.
Living in the Pacific Northwest for the past 40+ years, I get the appeal of airplanes that can operate off water. So I don’t fault the Searey for a higher accident rate due to more-risky modes of operation.
I don’t know why someone would buy a seaplane and not use it on water. Or a 4×4 and not use it off road.
Anyway, I’m glad they both got out. Maybe it’s time to mark the spot where numerous recreational boats and an airplane all struck debris in a single day.
It might be worth checking with AI to see if it is common for rivers to have logs floating in them or not. And considering the investment involved, the insurance company might also have an opinion about it as well. But hey, I don’t want to be a kill joy if someone has enough money that they can simply walk away from the crash and buy another toy.
According to the NTSB record, the builder of the airplane and the pilot during the accident had the same last name, so I expect the plane was probably built within the family. So they’d spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours building it. I would suspect they had more investment in the airplane than just the dollars.
Ouch.