Heroic Bystanders Mount Rescue Effort

A Seawind International Seawind 3000 amphibious airplane went down in Western Washington-State’s Lake Sammamish on the morning of Friday, 15 September 2023. The accident, which occurred at approximately 11:10 PDT, claimed the life of one of the aircraft’s two occupants; the second individual sustained significant head injuries and was transported to an area hospital.

First responders of the Bellevue, Washington Fire Department arrived on-scene to find a private citizen aboard a pleasure-boat attempting to rescue the accident victims from the waters of the seven-mile-long, 1.5-mile-wide lake.

Bellevue Fire Department rescue swimmers searched the water in the vicinity of the accident site for additional victims. None were located. The two aforementioned victims were transported to shore aboard the private boat. Bystanders attempted CPR until fire crews took over resuscitative efforts.

Bellevue Fire Department public information officer Heather Wong stated: "One of the residents said he swam out and went underneath the plane to try and access somebody, and he is one of the true heroes in this incident because he jumped in to assist somebody. He helped perform CPR when the patient was brought to the dock—truly heroic, we cannot diminish the level of assistance that was played by the residents here."

Local resident and witness Janelle Shuey asserted of the heroic bystander: "He saw the plane crash, jumped in his boat as fast as he could, flew out there, collected the guy out of the water, and brought him back to the dock."

Ms. Shuey added: "People doing CPR on the dock a couple of doors down, they did CPR for 15-20-minutes on one of the guys, the other guy was on another dock.”

Witnesses described watching the accident-aircraft attempt two-to-three takeoffs before “nose-diving” into the lake’s waters from an altitude of approximately fifty-feet AGL. So the Bellevue Fire Department set forth in a news release.

Ms. Wong reported: “They were watching the aircraft try to take off, they said they saw it go up two-to-three different times, came up, came down. It sounded kind of sputtering or like the engine was stalling and, at the last point, it was about fifty-feet in the air when it took a nose-dive into the water."

The cause of the accident—which is being investigated jointly by the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration—remains unknown.

FMI: www.ntsb.gov