So it would seem that the stills show the same sequence as the video? Now isn’t that a surprise...the only thing that the passengers wouldn’t have known is that Puentes had a photograph of the aircraft almost immediately after the plane belly-landed...before he flew to the island looking for help.
“the only thing that the passengers wouldn’t have known is that Puentes had a photograph of the aircraft almost immediately after the plane belly-landed...before he flew to the island looking for help.”
You meant Lang and not Puentes, I assume.
“If you check the sequence I posted you’ll see that it is possible the passengers in the stricken aircraft never saw Josh in the air when Josh took the first photograph. After he took that photograph which shows the aircraft in the water possibly only seconds after the belly-landing, he flew to the island to look for help.”
The part where you say, “shows the aircraft in the water possibly only seconds after the belly-landing,” is simply not possible, because of the timing of the events.
The Cessna 208B takeoff was about 1520 Hours, and the crash or ditching would have occurred a minute or two later. All of the passengers and the pilot were out of the aircraft and drifted away from the aircraft within the 3 minutes we see in the Puentes video. This puts the survivors in a position well away from the floating Cessna by about 1524 Hours. The ELT tranmitter notified the air traffic controllers of the emergency by about 1521 to 1523 Hours. The air traffic controllers then spent one or several minutes attempting to ascertain the emergency and to establish radio contact with the Makani Kai flight. When Lang called air traffic controllers at the Molokai tower to request clearance for his flight to Maui just before 1530 Hours, they asked Lang if he could hear the ELT signal of the Cessna. Lang spent more time, perhaps a minute, trying to tune-in the ELT signal with only small success, before he set out to locate the aircraft in distress by a visual search. It took another 5 minutes before they located the crashed cessna and the survivors in the water. So this timeline puts Lang on the crash scene no sooner than about 1535 to 1537 Hours. The survivors were already debarked from the Cessna 208B and floating well away from the Cessna by no later than 1524 Hours. So there had to be at least 11 to 13 minutes that the survivors had already been floating in the water before Lang’s aircraft could possibly have made its first appearance at the crash scene. Given the speed of their drift at 1/2 knot to 1 knot, the survivors would have drifted 550 to 1,300 feet from the crash site before Lang’s aircraft could have possibly arrived on the crash scene.
Using the Puentes GoPro video recording still frame you posted, we can see he was using the 170 degree wide angle lens (which works like a very wide angle fisheye lens). Dividing the camera’s 170 degree field of view into tens of degrees allows us some ability to roughly measure the distance to the tail of the Cessna. Using the Aircraft height of 14 feet and wingspan of 52 feet 1 inch, my calculations estimate the distance from the Puentes camera to the Cessna at about 700 to 900 feet. This distance concurs with the timeline distance of 550 to 1,300 feet before the earliest possible arrival of Lang’s aircraft on the crash scene.
In any case, it is simply not possible for Lang to arrive seconds after the Cessna ditched, because that would have Lang and his aircraft over the crash scene about 6 mintues before Lang even established radio contact with the Molokai tower to request clearance for his planned flight to Maui, much less had time to search the ELT radio distress band and then fly five minutes to the crash scene.