Pilot rescued after plane ditches in Gulf

Glenn Koedding, the pilot of the small plane that made an emergency water landing just off 40th Street on Friday, is happy to be around to talk about what happened that morning. He's still not sure why it did, though.

The 69-year-old pilot who has logged 460 hours in the air had a temporary partial loss of vision as he was skirting the Boca Grande coastline looking for sharks while flying at 2,000 feet.

I like to fly along the beach and look for sharks and schools of fish," he said. "I do it quite a bit. I was at 2,000 feet when I realized something was wrong. My vision wasn't completely gone, it started in my left eye and then went to both. It was like looking through a translucent object ... I could see color, shadows, various tones of light, but I couldn't read the instruments, that was the biggest problem. I could see the beach, which was a white line, so it was dark on one side, light on the other, so I decided to do a water landing. I just did the same thing I did when I was landing ... I even put the landing gear down, but I'm not sure why."

Koedding took off from Charlotte County Airport Friday morning. At 11:15 a.m. Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers received a report from another plane in the area of a distress call in the Boca Grande area. The airport notified the Charlotte County Sheriff's Office.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Aviation
• plane
• crash
• boca
• grande
• rescue

[iavissar]

how on earth did he emerge from the water with his sun glasses on?