Bizarre, Dangerous, Incident Under Investigation
As G-Class Mercedes are to Hollywood celebrities, so floatplanes are to Alaska—a defining, singularly indispensable means of transportation without which life would be reduced to a protracted series of overland drudgeries.
Were that universal logic prevailed, Alaska’s state bird would be the de Havilland DHC-2 Amphibious Beaver, not the Willow Ptarmigan.
Alas, just as some Alaskan’s are wont to hunt the Willow Ptarmigan, one boater on southern Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula’s set out besiegingly against pilot Eric Lee and his DHC-2 floatplane.
Mr. Lee—who owns Homer-based Alaska Ultimate Safaris—had his aircraft intentionally circled at hazardously close proximity by a small, commercial fishing boat as he was attempting to exit an inlet with seven flightseeing passengers on board. The boat—which was operated by a Halibut Bay businesswoman whose motivations and mental-state remain unknown—charged and harassed Mr. Lee’s floatplane, passing close enough to compel observers to opine: “She’s lost it. Somebody’s got to (deleted) do something about her.”
At one point the distance separating boat and aircraft was so small that the spinning propeller of the latter loudly impacted the watery wake of the former.
In a phone interview, Mr. Lee said he was water-taxiing prior to take-off when he spotted the vessel approaching. “The aluminum boat was coming toward me, I thought they were trying to get around me at first,” Lee recounted. “Then they started weaving back and forth fairly close to the aircraft.”
The waterway’s narrowness precluded Mr. Lee’s maneuvering his aircraft away from the boat, and he feared a collision was imminent.
“My concern level was high because she was—it appeared to be within inches—but more than likely within feet of our wings,” Lee asserted. “Had she, at those speeds, hit our wings, I just assumed it was going to be a catastrophe and we would have to evacuate.”
The notion of hurriedly deplaning seven passengers from a sinking, high-wing aircraft rightfully concerned Mr. Lee, who posited: “If the boat did actually hit me, how was I going to get them to get out of the aircraft and to safety? Because the tide runs through there pretty fast and sometimes creates a pretty strong current, and it’s fairly cold water and, of course, the sides of the bay are fairly rocky too, so it would have been a tough maneuver if I had to do that.”
Fortuitously, a second boat arrived on scene, and its occupant urged Lee’s assailant to relent—which she eventually did, ceding the waterway and permitting the floatplane to depart.
Aided by a viral video of the 26 August 2022 incident, the U.S. Coast Guard and Alaska State Troopers have undertaken an investigation of the boater and the rationale underlying her belligerence.
“I mean there’s a whole mess of things she could have done differently to address the situation if she had issues with me or just general operations in the cove,” Mr. Lee added. " I know that other people have reached out trying to figure out the best solution to all get along in the small environment, and so I think it should be investigated to figure out how to avoid this in the future.”
E-I-C Note: In many cases, the aviation community is urged to be a good neighbor and to turn the other cheek when it comes to conflicts with the non-flying public... but this is an absolutely unquestionable scenario in which aviation needs to stand up for itself and seek the most aggressive legal repercussions for the misguided person who deliberately put a number of innocent people, a pilot, and an aircraft, in harm's way for no explicable reason. ANN urges all responsible agencies to deal with this matter as aggressively as the law allows, and will be reaching to make this clear to those involved. -- Jim Campbell, ANN Editor-In-Chief/CEO
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