How To Waterski An Airplane, and Why You Probably Shouldn’t

alright guys this video is one that's probably gonna stir the pot among pilots across the internet it's something that's a topic that's been pretty polarizing in online groups and forums and it's probably the one that the the few haters that I do have and the AV haters this is the video to just dig into me on anyway we are going there we are talking about water skiing I'm gonna talk to you about how to do it why you probably shouldn't and how I got violated by the FA for doing so I'm Tripp Palmer it's like drones for a living and bush planes for fun follow along as I journey off the beaten path of aviation [Music] all right before we get into this I do want to do my little disclaimer I am NOT a CFI I am NOT a physicist I'm just a kid with a Kitfox at a YouTube channel and a basic understanding of how the physics and the act of waterskiing works so please don't take this as any sort of true instructional video you know never let this replace any actual instruction from a certified flight instructor this is more meant to just be an open conversation about a hot topic that has been recirculating the Internet so what is water ski and water skiing or water skimming is when you drag the tires of an aircraft on water it's a technique used by Alaskan bush pilots for decades to land on short gravel bars or sandbars of shorelines they use it as basically an approach to land it's also a technique a few of my friends have used to wreck their airplanes now you might be wondering why in the world would anyone do something so stupid it's a silly risk it's unnecessary all that and that's the that's normally the common argument I see online I don't want to go too far into that everyone draws their risk assessment in a different area so you know everything in life is a calculated risk walking out your door in the morning is a calculated risk and you know to each one's own I have friends that fly wingsuits off mountains that proximity fly that sport by nature has a very high mortality rate so it's pretty dangerous but I'm not someone that goes and hates on them for the risks they're willing to take it's just not one that I'm willing to take so for the sake of this argument if your only argument is that's an unnecessary risk I'm gonna say that's kind of null to each one's own on that one but the primary used for water skiing is the approach to landing aspect of it now when used properly it's gonna give you an advantage of landing on a short gravel or sand bar or shore line that you don't have that much room because you're gonna be able to touch down on the first inch of dry Shore get maximum braking at the lowest possible airspeed versus the other option of just trying to hit your mark when you could either flow past it or stall a little high end up with a mechanical balance giving up valuable braking room obviously this is a little bit of a weird situation because you still got to get out of there so it can make sense in times if you're flying in heavier then you're gonna fly out say you're dropping off river rafters and they're gonna meet you the river or maybe the winds are pushing you to where you actually have to land with the tailwind because there's a closeout you can't get in the other way that could be a time when you use it the argument that you land a whole bunch shorter is kind of not always true because your brakes are wet so that braking that you do get a used once you get on the ground is less effective than it is normally overall it's a pretty fun way and it is a good way to be completely stabilized when you get to that sand or gravel bar as far as the physics and everything that goes into it I know that there's been some FAA research done on hydroplaning however I believe the actual form of hydroplaning they're talking about is when there's a thin layer of water over a hard surface which will actually act as a different barrier that's basically going to lower the amount of traction you have it's like what will happen in your car anyone that's driven on a freeway and hit a puddle knows that you're gonna lose traction as soon as you go over that which obviously is a little different than waterskiing in open water so really quickly let's talk about the physics at play here now obviously at really high speeds the surface tension of water gets really hard so it's something that I mean you can look at a barefoot water skier as an example someone that's 200 pounds can ski basically on the heels of their feet at about 40 miles an hour and that's with the rope for the boat pulling them down they've got a whole bunch of stuff working against them but there's so much tension on the water at those speeds that they're able to skim across it so then when you look at something like an aircraft like mine for example me with you know half tank of fuel and the airplane I'm about 1,200 pounds and then I've got these huge balloon tires so when you look at the relationship of the amount of surface area you're touching versus the weight we're pretty dang close to the barefoot water ski thing although I do most of my water skiing with an airplane faster unless you really are coming up to land most of the time I'm in the 60 to 70 mile an hour starting range now really quickly there's a couple myths and misconceptions to this I actually had one guy tell me that oh yeah water skiing is all fun and games until you touch your brakes then you're gonna flip upside down and drowned now this brought to light a lot more of the mists knowledge to water skiing and the physics at play because it was interesting to me that someone would think that just touching your brakes on the water would cause the plane to flip upside down and drown well a simple response to that is at the speed I've water ski down at 60 to 70 miles an hour if I running my tires down a runway at those same speeds and I touch my brakes you know what would happen I'd go skidding down the runway like so many student pilots do when they try to grab brakes when they're still too fast my plane still flying it's not really putting that much weight on the tires so just grabbing the brakes when you're waterskiing really doesn't change much I mean effectively what's gonna happen if you touch the brakes while waterskiing you get a slight pitching moment forward you pull back on the stick a little bit the plane stabilizes back out and your wing struts get less wet because there's not as much water flinging off of them just your tails get more so the actual pressure we're putting on our tires on the water is a lot less than the weight of your aircraft because we're flying or if you could pull back at any second and fly so many people just seem to think that you touch the water and your wing shear off but at the speeds you water-ski at most of the time you're still at flying speeds your wing is still creating lift so really when you look at the physics of it it's not a miracle it's nothing insane it's actually very simple physics and simple science that's making it happen the amount of tension on that water at those speeds is really incredible I have a friend I'm not gonna say his name but one of my buddies was flying with another friend and they were over glassy water which for one is dangerous and we'll get into that in a minute but he was flying he was distracted looking at his friend trying to talk him down from doing something stupid he ended up impacting the water he was going about 80 miles an hour because he didn't see that he was getting close to the water hit so hard that he said he folded down into a seat his headset hit the floor everything but he bounced off that like a student's first time landing and he could not believe the surface tension but it just goes to show water is extremely hard at those speeds so obviously speed is your friend there's no real black magic to this the surface tension at those speeds is pretty incredible it is when you get slow that the danger starts to set in now the other side of the argument of this is what if you were to penetrate and go in and go swimming and you know the that brings up a pretty good safety talk in its own because if you were to get slow enough that your wheels were to penetrate it's gonna flip your plane upside down and you're gonna have probably a pretty rattled up state of mind and now you're trying to get out of an aircraft while you're upside down hanging from your seat belts that are normally bound up trying to get out as waters rushing in pushing your doors and windows to you can't open them now bear in mind a lot of these planes are not easy to get into and out of when they're sitting upright and you're in a perfectly calm state of mind so I can only imagine if you're flipped upside down with water rushing into your airplane right after you just got totally disoriented after flipping upside down in the water it could pretty quickly turn into a life-or-death situation with actually being able to get out of there without drowning especially when you factor in the pressure on the doors you're not even being able to open the doors you may have to wait for the entire thing to equalize underwater it's not a good thing which i think is the big argument and overall that's part of the reason why I'm gonna say I wouldn't recommend doing this if you're thinking about it but I realized that there's gonna be a few you guys that are out there and this this is actually because I've gotten a lot of messages in the past asking hey I'm going to go water-ski do you have any tips not only my tip is what it will be right now don't but if you're going to do it anyway as I know some people are I'd rather at least give you guys some hints and tips to make it a little safer before you go out and try something that is potentially a little hazardous and a little outside the normal operations of flight now the first thing before anyone goes in attempts this I highly recommend that you have big tires on your airplane I would not do it with a nose wheel aircraft I've seen it done but yeah if you get that nose wheel dipped into the water I don't think you're gonna be pulling it back out and again going swimming is not gonna be a fun thing and it could be pretty dangerous immediately life-threatening also I would say you should be very comfortable in your aircraft be able to grease a wheel landing every single time if you're someone that's still trying to figure out where the runway is and you're bouncing sometimes you're running into it you're not ready and just honestly being on the safe side it's better just to say you're not ready I think us as pilots we take pride in our skills and our knowledge and in doing so sometimes we have maybe a somewhat inflated view of our own skill set so if you're thinking about doing this maybe just take a second and say you know am I really ready and is it really worth it and then the main thing to keep in mind if you're going to do this I would do it at a higher speed start at 65 70 miles an hour depending on your air and I do it with flaps in because I like to be able to see over the front any additional lift is also gonna help and the biggest thing is we're talking about water speed here so you need to keep in mind water speed I don't recommend doing it into the wind because your actual speed over the water is gonna be a lot slower if it's a river do it up River don't be doing it with the flow because in reality you could be saying oh I'm on a water ski to the sandbar my approach puts me into the wind but I'm going downriver now you might have an indicated airspeed of say 40 or 50 on your approach but if you have a headwind of 10 miles an hour and then the water is going with you at another five miles an hour all of a sudden you're going only 25 over the water and you're getting pretty close to that danger zone of truly penetrating now again I highly recommend that you don't do it but if you were gonna go and do it the first time do not rush it do it close to the shore you want there to be a little bit of ripple in the water perfectly glass is dangerous and floatplane guys will explain that a little bit more of a essentially your depth perception goes to crap you can't really see but if you're close to shore at least you have some reference of height also it gives you a better chance if you were to flip worst-case scenario that you could get to shore don't go do it out in the middle of a huge lake because you're pretty much guaranteed you're gonna drowned out there and really the biggest thing is don't rush it anytime you're doing it don't push the thing onto the water just wait for it to come most likely the first time you touch the water you'll bounce off of it because it is like I said super firm the surface tension is insane at those speeds also once you do touchdown anticipate a little bit of drag so you're probably gonna have to add a little bit more power pull back on the stick a slight bit it's not huge also one thing to look out for as well is if your tires start bobbing up and down that's an indication that you're starting to penetrate the water basically your tires are starting to dip under and pop back out you'll start skipping that means you're too slow a full throttle get out of there you're in a bad place that's when you're just about to penetrate again I feel like I shouldn't even be telling you guys how to do this but I'm just hoping that if someone was gonna do it anyway maybe I can help you do it a little bit safer also one other big thing make sure to do it solo don't be bringing anyone else out there your first time doing it and really you shouldn't be water skiing with the passenger anyway that falls under the kind of ninety one thirteen careless and reckless they are which is one that they got me on but either way the first time you do it especially don't be risking any more than you need to again guys I don't recommend doing it I'm just telling you how I've done it alright now let's get into the part that some of you guys have probably been waiting for which is how I got violated for doing this this actually happened over a year ago it's something I kind of kept quiet because I wasn't really proud of it still I'm not super proud of it but just to give you a little backstory before this incident I had discussed the topic of water skiing or water skimming with multiple FAA inspectors I've always gotten kind of mixed responses but no one could really point me at a regulation that was at play and most of them said well you know it could be careless and reckless with the passenger and I'm like I understand that that anytime you endanger the life of another person it can be considered careless and reckless which again is it's kind of the FAA rubber rule they can kind of throw that at you anytime you have a passenger if they feel like you did anything they don't like so it's a kind of weird one I don't know how it sticks in court I wasn't someone that wanted to push it that far to find out but basically how my story happened and how I ended up getting violated for it was I was flying over Tahoe with a friend we did a flight by a friend that was on a dock you know staying are safe five hundred feet from him and we came back for another photo we had him on the phone he said yeah come back bye and my passenger said hey Trent can we do you know water ski I've seen you do it in all your videos I said well you know I really shouldn't not with the passenger on board I basically said no and he said come on please and I said well you understand there's a an additional level of risks here that aren't normally there and said I'm comfortable and we have this verbal discussion about a quick little safety protocols that if we were to penetrate open that door immediately and get out this thing's gonna fill with water you basically I tried to cover my my bases that said you know I'm not trying to say I didn't do anything wrong because clearly I did basically we went in did a water ski it was uneventful a couple weeks later I got a letter in the mail from the US Department of Transportation it was a certified letter that you have to sign for and it was a letter of investigation saying that the FAA had received some photos but another fAA guy was standing on the shore with the camera in hand and got some beautiful photos of me waterskiing with the passenger on lake tahoe my luck right that there's like an FAA guy standing with a telephoto lens in a camera in hand as I do the one time I don't want to ski with passengers and yeah but anyway I got called in for a little discussion with the FAA inspector assigned to my case he informed me that not only did I violate 91 13 which is careless and reckless because I had a passenger but 91 119 a which is the flight at a safe altitude f AR now I had assumed he was talking about Part C of that regulation which is referring to over open water you have to stay 500 feet from vehicles vessels persons and structures which I was so my argument was well no I know I was farther than that away and he said no one need to look at part a I don't have the regulation right in front of me but it basically states that at any time a flight must be conducted at an altitude that in the event of an engine failure an emergency landing can be conducted without undue hazard the persons or property on the surface now I can't say that I fully still understand how this pertains since the rural kind of states that you can create hazard in the event of emergency it's just undue hazard I don't necessarily see how I was creating undue hazard to more persons or property on the surface but which overall I don't necessarily know that I still see how it pertains however he's the inspector he's the one that had cleared all the way through the highest up in his office to take the full legal action should I want to go that direction I didn't you guys know me I'm the first to fall on my sword and say no this was my bad you know I won't do it again and luckily with the compliance philosophy that the FAA came out with in 2015 it gives pilots a chance to comply with regulations before the FAA can immediately seek legal enforcement action so because of the fact that I was compliant it ended up being just more of a corrective action which ended up putting me on probation for 24 months so no water skiing for me but overall what I learned from this is that even though I couldn't find where in the regulations it stated that it was illegal you need to understand that depending on the optics and perspective of an FAA inspector they can come after you for it and it sounds like other guys have actually been violated for this and gone farther with it again I wasn't one that was ready to take it to court I did end up after the fact reaching out to the office of chief counsel of the FAA requesting a legal interpretation of waterskiing and how the rules apply they got back to me with a letter saying your subject does not require legal interpretation and they sent me to the AFS 800 office which is one of the higher up Fisto offices it's over in Washington DC again I requested a legal interpretation what I got back was a letter from the inspector there telling me how not only is water skiing careless and reckless but landing anywhere but a paved runway can be careless and reckless because the performance numbers are not in your aircraft's operating handbook for landing anywhere but paved runways and I never really was given legal interpretation on either of the rules and how they would apply to water skiing more so I was just given the inspectors opinion on the matter and what they would consider careless and hazardous operations so to sum this one up I know it's been a little long I'm not water skiing because when I'm on probation and to when I started looking at the risk assessment and started thinking about what would happen if I did penetrate I just decided it wasn't worth it the one funny thing that came up across the board with all the FAA inspectors I spoke with was that if I was waterskiing to shore at that point it was part of your approach to land and 91 119 is no longer applicable so if I was waterskiing to shore it's perfectly legal or if I was using it as a departure technique which I don't recommend I know people have done it but you're walking a thin line there but anyway it was interesting to me that had I been landing or using it as an approach to land technique then it's perfectly legal however in my experience through my friends and what I've witnessed normally it's the people that are coming in to land that are getting extra slow that end up penetrating and flipping upside down I don't know of anyone that's actually done it out in open water I'm sure it's happened but it's not something that I've actually seen or heard of and I don't know of anyone that's died doing it again I'm sure someone probably has at some point guys I'm gonna wrap this one up here I've been rambling on for way too long to summarize all this if you're thinking about water ski and what one just don't do it too if you're gonna do it anyway be safe use a couple of those tips that I mentioned and please make sure that you're ready before you go do it do it near shore don't do it with passenger all of that and be aware that you are opening yourself to potentially being violated for a few of those regulations anyway hope you guys like this video if you did hit that like button subscribe if you haven't come be my wingman and see you guys in the next one peace [Music]

Channel: Trent Palmer

Views: 340,184

Keywords: Kitfox, kitfox aircraft, flight vlog, aviation, airplane, bush plane, trent palmer, freedomfox, airplane crash, instruction, tailwheel, landing, plane, pilot, flying, flight training, helicopter, oshkosh airventure, oshkosh 2018, airventure 2018, STOL, low and slow, student pilot, first solo, freedom fox, flying cowboys, waterski, airplane waterski, airplane water skim, airplane hydroplaning, airplane waterskiing, airplane water skiing

Id: 1I5x-zgXjTg

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2019