Plane Crash
Jonathan Leber
Audio: 911 call for help from Lake MichiganPosted on 04/26/2005 7:11:36 PM PDT by Jean S
A 20-year-old ministry student's rented single-engine plane ran out of gas and went down in Lake Michigan about five miles offshore, prompting him to make a frantic 911 call from his cell phone pleading for help.
| Plane Crash |
|
Jonathan Leber |
| 911 call |
| Audio: 911 call for help from Lake Michigan |
Rescue crews in boats, helicopters and planes spent much of Tuesday searching the choppy waters for Jonathan Leber before calling off the search late in the afternoon.
Leber told a dispatcher he had no flotation device and was planning to swim to shore.
"I need any help real fast," Leber of Springfield, Va., said in the call shortly before midnight Monday.
"My plane's going down real fast," he added as the dispatcher asked him questions.
He said, "I'm in the water" before the water could be heard in the background and the call cut off.
The Coast Guard estimated Leber could survive in the 44-degree water for about four hours, Lt.j.g. Boris Montasky said. Investigators don't believe the plane floated for long.
Leber, who was preparing for the ministry at Maranatha Baptist Bible College in Watertown, was flying west across the lake when he radioed he was low on fuel, Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said.
He ditched his plane in the lake a short time later.
Leber was flying under visual flight rules and was not required to file a flight plan, Cory said.
"He had gone for the weekend to New York. He had stopped in Michigan Sunday and was coming back from Michigan," said Darryl Sturgill, assistant to the college's president.
Leber had rented the plane from Wisconsin Aviation Four Lakes Inc. of Madison.
"It's tragic," said Jeff Baum, the company's president. "He was a young man with a promising life."
The National Transportation Safety Board would investigate the crash. The search included Coast Guard boats and helicopters, a C-130 plane from the Canadian Coast Guard and boats from the Milwaukee Police and Fire Departments.
Coast Guard Lt. Rolando Hernandez said the search would not resume unless investigators had new information that would lead them to think Leber could be alive.
Complete coverage of this story will appear online later tonight and in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in the morning.
Wasn't it a similar mistake that did JFK Jr. in? Whatever the mistake, a hard-nosed critique will save more lives than will tears and condolences.
The audio tape is from 911 emergency, and begins when he calls about 1 1/2 minutes before impact with the water .
Sad, but damn it all........why didn't this kid check his fuel????????? NO excuse for that.
Well, we mustn't critique the dead, now. I mean, it's not like some flight student somewhere could actually learn anything from that, right?
/end sarcasm
I hope that the reporter of the story is aware that mentioning the that the kid ran out of fuel gets the smack down that he deserves. How dare they report the facts.
Actually, it wasn't so much his number of engines that got him, but his amount of gas. Out of gas is out of gas, the more engines you have the faster it happens ;~D
Where I live, you're likely dead pretty much no matter where you lose power, especially at night. The most considerate place to go down is into water, or at least into areas with no lights.
Sad to lose a good kid.
I can see where hard to see wires would be a little bit of a problem. Yikes!
Well, cold water is NOT a considerate place. A forced landing into the tops of trees is no picnic, but the chances of survival are a lot better than into cold water well offshore.
Reminds me of the old advice about a forced landing at night:"When you're down to about 100ft, turn on the landing light. If you don't like what you see, turn it off again".
I learned to fly initially in Eastern WA, which is largely, flat, open and agricultural. There, we were encouraged in 'engine-out' training to look for good fields and avoid roads, both to avoid the risk of unseen power lines and to avoid danger to vehicles and people on the ground.
It only took a few flights over on the Western side of the state, with both more population, and hilly ground covered in douglas firs, to realize that much of my training in Eastern WA was just fantasy. Here, you'd be lucky to find a field, and roads, power lines or no, seem a lot more attractive as an option.
But you have none of these choices at night. You can't see much of anything you are descending into, and the humanitarian thing to do is to avoid the only things you can see... places with lights. There's no good outcome at night when the engine quits.
I didn't mean considerate for the pilot, I meant considerate for other people on the ground.
And yeah - I heard that joke too.
It appears you haven't been pinged to this good discussion!
expatpat wrote:
Reminds me of the old advice about a forced landing at night:"When you're down to about 100ft, turn on the landing light. If you don't like what you see, turn it off again".
--.Good one!
I was wondering, don't most pilots chart out a course on a flight map? I have no piloting experience, (except for MS flight sims since before i could drive a car!). If i fly "night" on the SIm, i feel uncomfortable flying unless i plan out ahead where i'm gonna go and knowing where stuff is on a map (and this is just on a flight sim!). Also, this being a "rental" plane, they wouldn't have given him advice on flying out? I know there's so many questions.
I listened to the 911 audio, just listening to the audio, it was bad advice from the 911 operator to try to keep him on the line once the plane started going under. They should have told him to start swimming. He had no other choice. It sounds like he was strugging to stay afloat while talking to the 911 OP once the plane went under.
Kid thought his plane would stay afloat another 3 minutes, even at that point i was already getting the feeling he had much less than that. Yikes
Realistically, situation is worse than he thought and as much as we hope he would still be alive.... I would say it would have been a miracle for him to survive.
VFR/IFR makes no real difference to engine out procedures... emergency landings are not made easier with better instrumentation ;~D
And I am one who has a commercial multi-engine certificate, and I can tell you that flying a light twin with one engine out is no pleasure cruise... it's more like driving a bus that only has tires on one side.
I missed that there was audio... I'll go listen. Honestly, it was a miracle that he didn't flip over when he hit, and die on impact.
Which may just be a factor in this...those winds this past weekend were ferocious.
OK - I've now listened to the audio. I didn't realize he didn't make the 911 call until ~after~ he hit the water. I wonder if he made any radio calls before he hit or if he was too wrapped up in his situation to do that.
Knowing the outcome now, I was screaming for the 911 operator to get up to speed faster, but really, it's a tough job for an operator to go from "hello" to full comprehension of the situation quickly from the choppy confusing conversations of people in trouble.
The call between the dispacter and the Coast Guard seemed a bit chatty and lacked the urgency I'd have assumed, but then I had to think, from the greeting, that this was clearly a second, follow-up kind of call... the guys who are going out are moving already, they aren't the people on the phone.
BTW, If you have long pants on, you have a floatation device.
Remove them, tie knots in the legs, close the fly, and fasten the button. When wet, these will hold air long enough for you to rest. Blue jeans work particularly well, and will only weigh you down if you are wearing them.
If you are in the water, flip them over your head while holding them by the waistband to capture air. Fill them by ducking under and blowing air up into them. This can help keep you afloat for quite a while if hypothermia does not get you.
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