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Video shows 23-year-old pilot swimming to shore after emergency water landing off Florida
ReVideo shows 23-year-old pilot swimming to shore after emergency water landing off Florida
Faith Tenkley, 23, safely ditched her twin-engine Piper in the Atlantic Ocean off Boca Raton on Saturday after experiencing mechanical issues, including a failed right engine and landing gear malfunction. She swam to shore before being rescued by a lifeguard and fire boat, with no injuries reported.
A 23-year-old Florida pilot walked away from a dramatic emergency water landing in the Atlantic Ocean off Boca Raton on Saturday, with video captured by a beachgoer showing her swimming to shore after ditching her family's twin-engine Piper aircraft.
Faith Tenkley, who has been a pilot for four years, was the only person on board when she was forced to land the plane in the water near 250 South Ocean Blvd. at about 9:40 a.m. local time. She had departed Page Field in Fort Myers and was headed to Bimini in the Bahamas to pick up her parents, according to Gulf Coast News.
Tenkley told Gulf Coast News that she began experiencing mechanical issues about 15 miles west of Boca Raton and initially planned to divert to Boca Raton Airport. But the landing gear then malfunctioned, and she feared a hard runway landing could ignite the recently refueled aircraft. By that point, the plane's right engine had also failed, leaving Tenkley to make a rapid decision to ditch the aircraft in the ocean rather than risk a landing on land.
Video captured the dramatic moments of the water landing, the quick rescue and the aftermath of a shaken Tenkley sitting on the beach, looking out to the sinking plane fully intact. A lifeguard reached Tenkley within about a minute after the plane went down, followed closely by a Boca Raton Ocean Rescue fire boat, according to local authorities. She was taken to a hospital as a precaution, and no injuries were reported, according to Boca Raton police.
Tenkley, who Fox News Digital has reached out to for comment, has declined media interviews outside of Gulf Coast News' Peter Busch. He reported she wanted to clear up misinformation that it was a male pilot rescued by a female surfer instead of vice versa.
"One of the reasons Faith wanted to talk to me was to clear up misinformation she saw online about the pilot being a guy and a 'surfer girl' rescuing him," Busch wrote on Facebook, detailing the conversation shortly after the water landing. "Faith was wearing a long skirt over a bikini. She took off the skirt to swim to shore. People on the beach saw a woman in a bikini and assumed she was a surfer helping the male pilot."
Witnesses watched the low-flying plane descend over the busy beach before it landed in the water. "One second I'm spraying sunscreen on my kid. The next I'm looking up and saying, 'Is that supposed to be happening?'" beachgoer Maria Marks told WPBF. Another witness, Alexis Arizzi, told the New York Post the aircraft made a slow descent and "delicately landed" on the water.
A pilot at the beach praised Tenkley's handling of the emergency, noting the plane remained in one piece. FlightAware lost track of the flight over land, but the safe water landing was chronicled in the onlooker's video.
