Originally Posted by
Lead Balloon
What to do next… What to do next…
I wasn’t there, but I’d set “THROTTLE” to “IDLE”.
With floats throttle to idle can make it nose over as the airflow over the elevator is lost, to stop it flipping over from the floats digging in nose first you have to apply back pressure, which normally lets the back of the floats dig in and slow down. It's possible he did cut throttle kicked off a wave and became airborne unexpectedly with no power and just slumped back to the left and flipped anyway. Just a theory. From what I've seen of those S-7S with the 100Hp they seem to fly away quite well with the engine running. My take is that everything looked normal, it was on the step at close to flying speed early in the clip until just passed the pylon, then a porpoising wave action where it seemed to lose speed and maybe a float come loose, sudden veer right, cut throttle, pull back, becomes airborne off a wave and the rest is obvious.