Experts impressed by small plane crash in water with no injuries

Thursday, a flight instructor and a student pulled a small airplane’s parachute and ended up in a canal right off the Caloosahatchee River near Cape Coral Bridge. It happened after they experienced undetermined issues in the air. No one was injured, and the two were both helped off the plane safely.

“It certainly appears these pilots did everything they needed to do to make this a survivable event,” captain Lee Collins said.

Collins is an aviation expert, and he appreciated what he saw from the small plane crash. We asked Collins how something like this happens.

“Not often at all,” Collins said. “In fact, aviation accidents are kind of rare on the whole.”

A pair of boaters drove past the crashed plane Friday afternoon while we were there to watch the plane get removed. We were able to let them know no one was hurt.

“Ya got the houses here; you’ve got the mangroves; there’s so many other situations that could have happened, and this was like the best,” said.

It was not an easy process to remove the airplane from the water near homes. Why the plane went down in the first place remains under investigation.

“We’ve got weeks, if not months ahead of us to determine what exactly happened and the sequence of events or events leading up to it,” Collins said.

But the owner of the company in charge of safely removing the plane told us this could have been much worse.

“This is the best outcome I’ve seen,” Patrick O’Brien said.