Members of Scout Troop 597 from Dacula were about six miles into their 50-mile annual Christmas paddle Saturday afternoon when they saw the first signs of trouble.
The group, 11 Scouts and nine adults, were paddling the Congaree River just outside Columbia, S.C., when “all of a sudden this plane comes over us,” David Moore, the troop’s scoutmaster, said Tuesday.
“He sounds like he is throttling back to land,” Moore said. “But it’s odd. There’s no landing strip by us, and his landing gearing’s not down.”
The pilot of the single-engine plane ended up landing in the river.
And the Scouts wound up rushing to help him and having a Christmas week adventure they won’t soon forget.
“We talked about it later,” Moore said. “We said: “This is why we train. This is why we bug you to learn your first aid. You just never know when you’re going to need it’.”
Moore expected to hear the pilot’s Mooney 20 crash once it throttled back about 2 p.m. Saturday, with no place to land. But it didn’t.
Instead, about 10 minutes later, as the Scouts paddled around another bend in the South Carolina river, they saw what they thought was a remote-controlled sailboat.
“When we got closer, it was obvious it was a plane,” said Alex Taaffe, a member of Troop 597 and a seventh-grader at Gwinnett County’s Osborne Middle School.
By that time, the plane’s pilot had already made it to shore and was on the cellphone talking with a 911 dispatcher.
His clothes were drenched, and he was freezing, said Forrest Puckette, the Scouts’ senior patrol leader and a senior at Mill Creek High School.
Moore gave the pilot a coat and provided him GPS coordinates to give to the emergency workers who were en route to the remote area between Columbia and Gaston, S.C.
Puckette and several other Scouts scrambled to gather wood and start a fire to warm the pilot until the rescuers arrived.
“I was thinking he was lucky to be alive,” said Scout Logan Paugh, “And we all felt good. We were happy we arrived when we did to help.”
The troop, based out of Hamilton Mill United Methodist Church in north Gwinnett, goes on a Christmas paddle each year. Usually, they go to a different river each year, but this was their second time at Congaree, Moore said.
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
Maj. Robert McCullough with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, said Moore and the scouts “in typical Scout fashion” resumed their paddling once the ambulance arrived and they knew the pilot was in good hands.
The emergency medical technicians checked him out and determined he didn’t need a trip to the hospital, McCullough said.
DNR officers marked the airplane, which was “mostly submerged” with a buoy so it would be in clear view for crash investigators. Then they gave the pilot a ride to the Columbia airport, McCullough said.
About the Author
