Posted on 01/10/2014 1:52:43 PM PST by The Sons of Liberty
A month after a small plane crash in Hawaii, a surviving passenger shows GoPro footage and even a selfie taken during the ordeal.
Would you have done the same? Ferdinand Puentes was one of nine passengers in a 2002 Cessna Grand Caravan which suddenly suffered engine failure off Kalaupapa, Molokai in Hawaii last month. As he heard the engine fail and saw the plane heading for the water, one of his first instincts was to turn on his GoPro camera and film what might have been his own demise. As KHON-TV reports, Puentes knew the danger he was in, yet the decision to film as much as possible might perplex a few. He managed to get out of the plane alive and survived the crash. However, while he was floating on a seat cushion and wearing his life raft, he took a selfie.
Was the impulse to record just a natural reaction? After all, any bystander or news organization would have likely done the same thing. And these days everyone is using their phones to film just about everything they see. But wouldn't one's first instinct be to try to contact family and friends to say goodbye? Perhaps that did happen. The footage reflects a quite stunning lack of panic. The passengers behave in an orderly manner. There is no screaming or pushing. No one seems frantic at all. Loretta Fuddy, Hawaii's 65-year-old state director of health, died in the crash, despite managing to leave the plane. In watching Puentes talk to KHON-TV, though, it's evident that the footage brings back painful memories. Would everyone want to have such ready access to a reminder? Or would some prefer to forget? "You could have died," Puentes told KHON-TV. "There's so much variations that could have happened for the worse."
Somebody might find a dummy though, or it could get beaten up by the waves. I don’t know; maybe they had both. Maybe there was one extra woman AND a dummy. Maybe the extra person was supposed to put the dummy in place. But if so, she wasn’t very smart about it because the reports said that Fuddy drifted farther out to sea. If the drift was going to take people closer to shore, it wouldn’t have been so hard for Puentes and Holstein to get as far as they did. Maybe the extra person was to make confusion in the reports so nobody could know who went where.
I don’t know exactly, but I do know from the video footage that there was at least one extra live woman that was hidden by everybody, and there was either a live person or a dummy that was closer to shore than Puentes.
Interesting about Puentes’ clothes because he commented that his life jacket wasn’t holding him up because of his heavy work clothes. That seemed suspicious to me because Kawasaki - a large man - said that he held onto somebody else who had a life jacket on, to stay up. If a lifejacket would hold up Kawasaki and another person, I don’t think it would have any trouble holding up Puentes even if he had steel-toed work boots on.
Do those life jackets have dual air chambers? I thought I had read that somewhere. There a selfie that Puentes took with everybody bobbing around in the water, showing one of his life jacket’s chambers inflated and another on top of it, uninflated and blowing in the wind. The story about Kawasaki giving away his life jacket could have been to cover for the extra woman being given a life jacket. But it would have been silly of them to not have enough life jackets for everybody. Maybe they wanted one person to not have a life jacket so they wouldn’t be in the count of what various people saw.
Could that person closer to shore have been Fuddy? How good of a swimmer was she?
Inflatable dolls sink when filled with water????? Slow pin hole in bottom or seam
One of the first thing we learned in swim class was how to hold on life preserver and take off shoes etc. didn’t buy that either. Plus he had scuba training and unless he was planning on making a dive to recur someone would certainly not need the extra weight. Unless of course he had been trained as a navy seal and swam with gear!
Can you check his name against dive teams?
One of the first thing we learned in swim class was how to hold on life preserver and take off shoes etc. didn’t buy that either. Plus he had scuba training and unless he was planning on making a dive to rescue someone would certainly not need the extra weight. Unless of course he had been trained as a navy seal and swam with gear!
Can you check his name against dive teams?
The stories had Fuddy being farther out to sea than the others, not closer to shore. So whoever it is doesn’t fit the story for Fuddy.
To my eyes she also doesn’t fit Fuddy’s appearance. She doesn’t have Fuddy’s glasses on (Fuddy’s glasses go all the way over to her ear) and has shoulder or just below the shoulder length straight brown hair. Others here disagree. They say because the face seems deathly white and there are purple tinges in the water around her it must be Fuddy.
Ultimately we probably won’t ever know. What we WILL know is that there was at least one extra person that everybody hid from us, and we’ll have to see how they try to account for that person and why her existence was hidden by everybody.
Puentes had scuba training? I missed that; do you have a link? Does his facebook page have him in scuba gear? (I don’t do scuba so I’m clueless about that; this is why many eyes working together is invaluable!)
It would make sense, given his lifelong history of fishing.
It’s all confusion. Some stories made it sound as if they had to blow up their life vests, while that video Fred linked has Hollstein saying that the life vests self inflate, which makes more sense. Puentes said he was well acquainted with the water, being a spear fisherman, so why didn’t he think to take off the steel-toed boots that he admitted were weighing him down?
On one of the videos, the reporter said that the reason the audio on Puentes’s video was so muffled is because the camera was inside a scuba mount. Isn’t that stick the camera was on also scuba gear? It was on his Twitter feed or Facebook page, iirc, where he said he is a spear fisherman.
This is where my ignorance gets in the way. I know nothing about either scuba gear or Go Pro equipment. Hopefully somebody who knows/understands how it all works together will chime in here.
WHOOPS!
hit the wrong reply box again...see above
It's so simple it's a wonder no one thought of it years ago...
If I were writing the novel, I’d have someone slipping Ms F a “Mickey” so it would make her look unresponsive and then do the switcheroo @ the church
yellow, long sleeves, looks like lycra.
Swim trunks? ???!!!!????
Who wears swim trunks to a meeting (or whatever function he was going to)
gah!
Yamamoto knows/knew something.....
Good one add that to the cliff note version
Mmmm? That would also go along with the story line of the priest her confessor and confidant that organized the entire plot so she would not have to commit a sin of lying under oath
What else do we know about the good father?
Maybe he was wearing one shirt over the other and pulled outer one off?
if that's an image of him on the island while he was spear-fishing, he would have changed from his scuba diving gear. The video that was on the site this image came from seems to have been removed.
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