Photographer captures seaplane flip

TAVARES — On a windy evening in Tavares, Angela Allen decided to try out a new lens for her Nikon camera to photograph the city’s seaplanes.

But when she started snapping pictures of an aircraft circling above and then landing on Lake Dora in “America’s Seaplane City,” it became evident that it had more trouble in the water than in the air.

“The water was super choppy; he was kind of wobbling back and forth and … I guess he just lost control,” said Allen, 33, of Leesburg. The plane’s nose tipped into the lake, she said, and the rest of the plane tumbled forward during its descent Friday.

“By the end, the only thing you could see was landing gear, basically,” she said of the overturned boat about 100 yards from Wooton Park’s shoreline.

The pilot of the seaplane, which belonged to Jones Brothers Air and Seaplane Adventures in Tavares, could not be reached for comment, but walked — or swam — away without injury. His seaplane is one of three that have flipped in Lake Dora in the past six months, according to the Tavares Fire Department.

Steve McCaughey, executive director of the Seaplane Pilot Association in Lakeland, said two of those incidents were “totally preventable.”

On March 21, John Cossette’s plane flipped in Lake Dora as he was making a U-turn on the lake. He was not injured.

“They were not traveling at speed; no one was in danger — they were taxiing,” McCaughey said. “Quite honestly, it was just improper pilot technique.”

On average, there are total of six deaths per year related to seaplanes in the country. In Florida alone, there were 67 boating fatalities in 2016.

McCaughey added that Tavares is one of the top five busiest seaplane ports in the country.

In September, Hurricane Irma tore through Central Florida — destroying all of the Tavares’ seaplane docks. The city is inking a contract with a design-build firm now, but completion of the docks is more than a year away, with an estimated cost of $8 million to $10 million, most of which could be covered by city insurance.

“We’re antsy; we want it done, but it’s a process,” Tavares economic development director Bob Tweedie said Monday.

McCaughey said the city has been a model seaplane base throughout the U.S.

He said flips such as the one Friday often are the result of a chain reaction set off when a float becomes and stays submerged.

“It’s pretty technical stuff … he was probably making a turn,” McCaughey said. “It’s kind of a slowmotion type of event.” For Allen, that much was true. She snapped photographs as the pilot was safely picked up by boaters and the seaplane slowly tilted forward.

“Thank God somebody was already on the lake to help this guy,” she said.