A Business Crashes

John Wells is used to sitting hunched in a cockpit, commandeering a seaplane to the surface of the water, scooping up a load and then racing for the nearest fire like a combination of Red Adair and the Red Baron.

For Wells, the thrill of flying mixed with the knowledge “that I’m helping people--that I’m saving lives and property” is, in his words, like the highest high one can experience.

But the Wells who greeted the press Tuesday at Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego looked like anything but the high-flying daredevil of the air. His right arm was wrapped in a cast and his torso was bandaged in a patchwork quilt to cover his cuts and bruises.

Wells, 37, the owner and chief executive officer of Airborne Fire Attack of Aliso Viejo, expressed joy at merely being alive, an “answered prayer” he also extended to his partner and co-pilot, Mark Cooper, 48, of Dana Point.

Both men were a lot more fortunate than the vintage World War II search-and-rescue plane they crashed Friday in the San Vicente Reservoir while fighting a 720-acre brush fire in Ramona, in northeastern San Diego County.

Wells suffered a broken shoulder, an infection in his deeply lacerated right hand and a mosaic of stitches and staples in his now partially shaved head. Cooper underwent 10 hours of surgery to have two fingers on his left hand reattached.

On Tuesday, Wells greeted the press in a wheelchair. He spoke solemnly of how he and Cooper--who declined to appear--almost lost their lives.

“I’ve been through aircraft incidents before,” said Wells, who began flying seaplanes to Catalina when he was only 16. “I don’t want anybody to ever have to go through the feeling of being trapped in a plane.”

The feeling is only heightened, Wells said, if you’re underwater, as he was.

“I kept thinking, ‘I’m 20 seconds away from this being my water coffin,’ ” he said, remembering a life-saving detail from a helicopter pilot that may have kept him from drowning.

Barely conscious and feeling disoriented, Wells recalled the instruction of “following your bubbles so you can tell where ‘up’ is. I just needed to find ‘up.’ So I followed my bubbles and reached the surface, next to the left engine. At that point, I thought I was going to live.”

Last year, in Canada, Wells invested $500,000 in the 1944 Canso PBY-5A, which quickly became the flagship of his fledgling company. Since then, with Wells at the helm, the amphibious tanker, soaring through the sky with its big red belly and extended silver wings, had flown 55 firefighting missions for an upstart company with five employees.

And while Wells’ experience in such missions was limited to 18 months, company spokesman Joe Lowe said Tuesday that the pilot had flown 7,000 hours in a seaplane and made 8,000 water landings before crashing. Wells prided himself on using his plane to beat out helicopters and expensive seaplanes at putting out fires faster and cheaper.

But recently, luck was not always so apparent.

Wells and his crew had hoped to obtain a firefighting contract with Los Angeles County, but were passed over in favor of two leased Super Scooper airplanes, which carry more water and don’t need to swoop as low to restock their water supply. The Super Scooper lease fee for five years: $7 million.

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At the time of the crash, Wells’ World War II tanker, which he called “Scarlet” and referred to as one of his children (along with a Siamese cat), had served as a “last call” aircraft for the California Department of Forestry.

Before Friday’s crash, Wells said the plane--called “the California Water Bomber”--had flown 120 hours and dumped 385,000 gallons of water and fire retardant on blazes throughout Southern California.

Lowe said the crash is being investigated by both the Forestry Department and the Federal Aviation Administration, which had certified Wells and his plane. The Forestry Department had employed him on an hourly, as-needed basis.

Officials for the both agencies declined comment.

Despite the pending investigations, Wells made an effort to answer some questions, saying he and Cooper had made several successful drops on last weekend’s Lake Wohlford fire in the San Diego area before heading to Ramona, where a new blaze was breaking out.

Having made a couple of successful drops already, he again headed toward the San Vicente Reservoir and had a clear view of the surface until . . . he went “from 70 mph to zero in about five seconds” before smacking the water head-on.

“The plane started to dig in and do what we call a bow suck, meaning the nose started to tuck under,” Wells said. “Normally, you can recover from that with very abrupt back pressure, but in this instance, the airplane nosed over.”

Danger went from bad to worse when “I heard a loud pop. . . . What I believe happened was that the nose-wheel doors on the front of the airplane imploded. And when that let go, it opened up a 4-foot-by-6-foot hole in the cockpit.”

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Wells described the sensation as “water rushing into a hole at 80 miles an hour. The cockpit floor just exploded and the water roared up between us. The damage ripped right through the middle of the plane. It damaged my right hand and my co-pilot’s left hand, which shows you the direction it was moving.”

Next, Wells remembered “a tumbling motion--for some reason, it reminded me of the movie ‘Twister,’ because it felt like being trapped in a tornado. One whole part of the plane was just blown away.”

By the time Wells remembered his bubbles and reached the surface, he found his co-pilot hanging onto the left wing. And although paramedics feared that Cooper might lose some fingers or even a hand, reconstructive surgery has, for now, averted the worst, doctors said.

As for flying again, Wells sighed and said, “Emotionally, it’s been tough. But, yes, I hope to fly again. I have to fly again. . . . It’s my life.”