Pilot Walks Away From Hard Landing Along Utah Lake Shoreline
Sep 29, 2018, 9:49 PM | Updated: Feb 14, 2023, 4:19 pm
SARATOGA SPRINGS, Utah – A pilot walked away uninjured from a hard landing along Utah Lake’s shoreline Saturday afternoon.
The incident happened around 12:45 PM. Pilot Creighton King said he was practicing some landings along a shoreline near Pelican Point when a gust of wind caught his Piper Cub.
“The wind came from the south, just kind of blew me in and once I caught in that water, the wind just caught my tail and unfortunately I went over in about 12 inches of water,” King said. “I pulled the power, put my hands up. My buddy’s on the radio right away, ‘You okay?’, ‘Yeah, I’m good’. Shut everything off and hopped out.”
The airplane came to rest upside-down. King’s friends, a group known as the Flying Cowboys, were on the scene to help King pull his plane back to shore and haul it away. The group lands in back-country areas across the state trying to be good ambassadors for aviation, helping with search and rescue efforts and cleaning back-country areas up.
“Me and my buddies will fly to places where a lot of times people will leave a mess if they’re shooting or if they’re having a party or something,” King said. “We’ll land there. We’ll clean it up, and heavier out,”
King said he expects repairs to the Cub won’t take long.
