Veteran Pilot Makes Big Splash in This Landing

Bill Boucher has flown a lot of seaplanes in his time. But the Piper TA-30 he was flying Friday was not one of them.

“I guess it is now, though,” joked Boucher, 52, of San Diego.

A few hours earlier, both of his plane’s engines had quit, forcing Boucher to make a splash landing two miles offshore from the San Onofre nuclear power plant in northern San Diego County. Boucher, the only person aboard the two-seater, was rescued by a Marine helicopter.

He came away from the scare with nothing more serious than a stiff neck.

The plane is at the bottom of the sea.

“I had the door open before I touched down,” Boucher said Friday night. “I got out and stood on the wing until it sank. Then I sat on the tail until it sank. The whole plane sank in about 10 minutes.”

A helicopter crew from the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station--aided by Orange County sheriff’s deputies, who first spotted the pilot from their own helicopter--plucked the thoroughly chilled Boucher from the sea about 4:10 p.m., half an hour after his Mayday call alerted air traffic controllers that he was in trouble, and whisked him to San Clemente General Hospital. Doctors there found no apparent injuries, and Boucher was driven home Friday night by his wife, Brenda.

Boucher said he was flying to San Diego from San Jose when the right engine developed high fuel pressure. “More than likely that indicates plugged injectors,” Boucher said.

Then, as he was about 1,500 feet above the water, the fuel flow and oil pressure on the left engine dropped, and it “flat gave up the ghost and quit,” he said. “I kept it above the water as long I could, but I had no choice but to land in the ocean. I got tossed around a little, but it was a fairly smooth landing, considering.”

Boucher, a communications consultant and part-time commercial pilot, said he has been flying more than 30 years and logged more than 5,000 hours in the cockpit. He had been flying the Piper home from a San Jose repair station, he said, where it had been for about a year.

“It had a lot of work done up there,” Boucher said of the 20-year-old Piper, which he bought in 1982.

Boucher said he was not ready to blame anyone for the engine failure. Asked whether he would soon be calling the mechanics who worked on the plane, however, Boucher answered, “I reckon.”