WW 2 Avenger ditched off Florida beach

[Pilot DAR]

An Avenger was ditched off a Florida beach, nice job of ditching, 'shame about the plane...

https://www.businessinsider.com/vide...a-beach-2021-4

[Auxtank]

Not clever.
Look how many people are in the water.

[DaveReidUK]

Hmmm.

[Nightstop]

The NTSB will have a field day investigating the pilot’s decision to ditch close inshore, with swimmers in the vicinity. He wasn’t wearing any PFD, but saved his headset and himself.

[blind pew]

Good decision

Once put a glider into a field full of those huge straw bales which had had one fairly narrow swath cleared. Police patrol and rescue turned up « you were lucky they only just cleared that area this morning ».
Obvious that he put it down into a clear area as close as he dare to the beach.

[DaveReidUK]

blind pew

"Obvious that he put it down into a clear area as close as he dare to the beach."

Well yes - he didn't hit anyone, so obviously the area turned out to have been clear ...

Twitter

I think the jury is still out on the judgement/luck ratio.

[blind pew]

Having done several hundred landings not on runways or prepared terrain as long as you understand the problems which include target fixation it isn’t that difficult.
Flying that sort of kit, unless it was through chequebook rather than ability, I would put money on judgement rather than luck.
As the video shows once he hit the water it stopped so at anytime he had that option.

[what next]

Originally Posted by blind pew

Flying that sort of kit, unless it was through chequebook rather than ability, I would put money on judgement rather than luck.

Sorry, but seeing just how close he came to some of the people in the water this looks like "way-beyond-judgement close" to me. He obvioulsy is an excellent pilot but I doubt that he ever deadsticked that aircraft type into the sea, so what experience would his judgement be based on? Ditching just 20 metres further offshore would have been good judgement also...

[simmple]

20 metres further out it may have sunk and drown the occupants if knocked unconscious or trapped.
Where they put it was probably shallow enough to sit on bottom plus plenty of folk nearby to help!

As someone once said when it all goes wrong you don’t see the school never mind the children!

[ShyTorque]

Yet some people think it perfectly acceptable to land on the public highway...with hardly a mention.

[Nightstop]

Yet some people think it perfectly acceptable to land on the public highway...with hardly a mention

No, it’s not acceptable to deliberately land on a public highway, or any other location, where your emergency puts other peoples’ lives at risk. Very selfish and unacceptable imho.

[megan]

Folks do things deliberately all the time that put the lives of others at risk. Drunk and drug affected driving, speeding (Tiger Woods double the speed limit), guns, crash into houses (planes and cars) causing injuries and loss of life. In the US they average 1013 persons admitted to hospital yearly as a result of aviation accidents, with a 2% in hospital fatality rate (Aviation-Related Injury Morbidity and Mortality: Data from U.S. Health Information Systems). In a short search I could only find one instance where a third party was killed by an aircraft attempting to land on a highway. Perhaps we should just pull the doona over our heads and hope it all goes away.

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Those damn flying machines come down anywhere it seems.

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This selfish dummy put it down on a road instead of taking the house option.

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[rnzoli]

I think it's impossible to judge individual actions without understanding the mental schemes driving our bias towards one (OK to land on beach, highway) or other other (not OK)..

Here is an imaginary context, in order not to get bogged down on validity of numbers. This is totally made up, but good for illustrating the bias we can have.
Imagine that we live in a world, where on a yearly basis, 100 aircraft, with 200 occupants in total, crash, crash-land or emergency land outside airports and airfields, threating generaly public lives.

Outcome Year #1: :

Aircraft occupants:
Fatality: 20
Serious injury: 50
Minor or no injury: 130

General public on the ground:
Fatality:10
Serious injury: 20
Minor or no injury: no data.

Outcome Year #2:

Aircraft occupants:
Fatality:50
Serious injury: 80
Minor or no injury: 70

General public on the ground:
Fatality:0
Serious injury: 0
Minor or no injury: no data.

Many pilots will tend to prefer Year #1, because it increases the survivability of airplane crashes, and they will be biased to land on roads, beaches in emergencies..
The general public will prefer Year #2, because that poses the minimum risk to them. They will hate pilots who put innocent lives at risk for saving their own skin, even if no one is hurt on the ground.
Those who feel part of both groups (one day a pilot, the other just an ordinary person on the ground), look at the total picture and realize that Year #1 resulted in less overall deaths and injuries than Year #2, so it's a more favorable outcome for the overall society. When being
pilots and facing emergency landings, they will also be biased to use roads and beaches for landing sites, due to the perception that it's usually ovvers a better overall outcome for the entire society, rather than heading for cliffs and forests and deep sea.

Now imagine that the situation changes during year #3

Outcome Year #3:

Aircraft occupants:
Fatality: 20
Serious injury: 50
Minor or no injury: 130

General public on the ground:
Fatality:100
Serious injury: 200
Minor or no injury: no data.

You can see that the aircraft occupants are impacted the same way as in year #1, but there was a lot more civilian casualties. How will that impact the opinions?
Many pilots, who prefer Year #1 outcome, will still bias for high aricraft occupant survivability as before.
The general public will be outraged about the increasing casualty numbers.
Those who feel part of both groups, look at the total picture and realize that Year #3 resulted in more overall deaths and injuries than Year #1 and #2, so it's a less favorable outcome for the overall society. When being
pilots and facing emergency landings, they will now be biased to avoid roads and beaches as emergency landing sites, due to the changed perception that it's usually causes more grief for the entire society than heading for cliffs and forests and deep sea.

Even when down to 1000 ft, it is very hard to see what is the actual general public density on a road or a beach, so you can't really run an exact calculation of the risks to yourself vs. risks to people on the ground. Instead, our perception on the outcome will influence us making a decision on landing site priorities. And some of us are thinking it's OK for risking general public life to some extent, in exchange for saving aircraft occupant lives, as long as the overall balance is positive, meaning more lives saved in total, than lost, more serious injuries prevented than suffered. This is a little bt cold-hearted, yet pragmatic approach, that comes with the possibly of dire, life-long consequences of risk taking ("I survive, but I kill innocent people on the ground") .

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[DaveReidUK]

Originally Posted by rnzoli

I think it's impossible to judge individual actions without understanding the mental schemes driving our bias towards one (OK to land on beach, highway) or other other (not OK).

On the contrary, I think that the consequences (both actual and potential) of an action are a pretty good basis for forming a judgement.

[rnzoli]

Originally Posted by DaveReidUK

On the contrary, I think that the consequences (both actual and potential) of an action are a pretty good basis for forming a judgement.

For yourself, surely yes. For a discussion with others, no. Bias - including your own - is a distorting eye-glass, we can watch the very same thing for hours on end, we won't get a useful discussion, let alone a common conclusion, if we don't consider the effect of our different bias.
This already happens in this thread
Those biased towards landing in public places, will downplay the risks and inflate the skills of the pilot.
Those biased towards NOT landing in public places, will inflate the risks and attribute successful outcomes to luck.
There is limited hope for any common conclusion or agreement on how to act in a similar situation.

By the way, if a specific case gets into court, the judge will try to look at the events through the "legal eye-glasses", too, rather than the perspective of airmanship or moral obligations.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...pilot-portugal

[DaveReidUK]

Your definition of "bias" appears to amount to not much more than somebody disagreeing with your point of view.

I'm happy to plead guilty to that.

[GeeRam]

There are more questions than answers for all the issues surrounding this incident and events leading up to it...if the what is being reported elsewhere is in fact true.

As mentioned in first post, the authorities might be having a field day with this one......its a miracle that no one on the ground (in the sea) was injured/killed.

[Waltzer]

A few facts

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[First_Principal]

A few factshttps://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mVFwYq...ature=youtu.be

I suppose it's possible there are 'a few facts' in that rambling diatribe but, if so, they'd be hard to pluck out from the noise.

[Waltzer]

Originally Posted by First_Principal

I suppose it's possible there are 'a few facts' in that rambling diatribe but, if so, they'd be hard to pluck out from the noise.

So the fact that an aircraft going into display trailing enough smoke to make the guy on the ground think that it has a smoke system fitted isn’t worth consideration.
Also the fact that the pilot carried on with his display after being told on more than one occasion and in the full knowledge that he was trailing a lot of smoke from somewhere at the front.
Any pilot worth his salt would have been looking to land asap whilst it was still producing power.
Ignorance at best, dangerous to the point of deadly at worst.