A British Columbia pilot now has a remarkable story of survival to tell after abandoning his little plane in the ocean off the Baja peninsula.
Mike Macdonald had been hired to fly over the Gulf of California with a marine biologist to look for fauna last weekend.
“Our job is to go there and locate animals, identify them, mark them, mark their location and in what direction they are heading,” he told Global News.
But about three hours after a four -hour tour, his engine suddenly stopped and he realized that he could not end.
“My colleague thought I was playing a sick farce, but no, it was the real deal and we had less than three minutes to prepare ourselves,” Macdonald told Global News.
After a few minutes of troubleshooting, he realized that he was going to have to abandon the plane in serious swell far from the shore.
“Depending on the application we use for our follow -up, it is said that we were 61 knots, which works at around 113 km / h when you hit the water,” added Macdonald.
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“And it was a very sudden stop in fairly large swells with a little white caps and an involved wind.”
He said that as soon as they hit the water, they led their safety belts, rolled the plane and had to inflate their life vests. While his partner is inflated with few problems, Macdonald said he had to explode manually.
“Fortunately, I am a bagpipe, so it was not too difficult to do,” he joked.
Fortunately, apart from some cuts and bruises, both were ok.
“It was just like a sea monster stretched out and caught us and fired us and criticized us forward,” said Macdonald about the impact.
“It was therefore a kind of weird feeling.”
The follow -up application recorded impact and rescue staff was shipped.
The pair floated in the ocean for more than two hours before the arrival of the first ship.
One of the items that floated without wreckage was a naval radio and the pair used it to guide the first ship to arrive, which was a charter boat, on their location.
The marine rescue arrived after that and the pair was taken to the PAZ for treatment for minor injuries.
Macdonald said that his training and a sense of duty towards his colleague kept him so calm during this emergency situation.
“If it was just me, maybe I would have been in a different head space, absolutely, but I felt completely responsible for it, and I had to make sure that it came out in one piece,” he added.
Macdonald lost his passport in the wreckage, but after meeting the accident investigators, he will return home when he gets his new document.
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