The Tribune

By RASHAD ROLLE

Tribune Staff Reporter

rrolle@tribunemedia.net

CAPTAIN Rufus Ferguson, a pilot who is being hailed as a hero for saving the lives of nine passengers, credited his faith in God and his up-to-date training with the miraculous water landing.

The 56-year-old pilot was attempting to land his Piper Navajo plane at the Lynden Pindling International Airport on Monday morning the same way he has landed more than 15,000 flights since starting his career in 1993 when a warning signal appeared on his monitor.

It indicated that one of his landing gears had failed to disengage and lock.

His reaction was swift and his flying capabilities helped him overcome numerous challenges and land the plane in waters near Clifton Pier, saving the lives of all but one of the 11 people on board.

Captain Ferguson recounted his harrowing experience in an interview with The Big T yesterday.

He said his faith and his training were the only things helping him overcome the landing gear problem and an engine failure which, if not for his actions, could have caused an aviation disaster.

“After seeing the warning I called the tower to let them know of the difficulty and said that I would slow down to troubleshoot to see what the problem was and if it could be fixed,” he said.

“If I had landed with the warning indicating I had only two gears out and locked, I could’ve landed on the runway and the plane would have gone to one side and killed everybody. The (officials in the tower) asked me to fly in so they could visually look and see if all the landing gears were down.”

The officials told the pilot that all gears appeared down, though they could not ascertain whether all were locked.

Aware that landing without all gears being locked is dangerous but manageable, Captain Ferguson decided to conduct a cautious landing and began by circling the area.

“At that point the passengers noticed something was wrong,” he said. “One passenger, I was told later, started texting her family to say ‘We ain’ landing and the pilot doing something.’

“When I went to turn around I developed another problem, this one with my right engine. I started seeing indications on the gauges that the engine was heating up. My instruments started fluctuating and I determined there was a problem so I went into another mode.”

Captain Ferguson said he remained as calm as possible while faced with two serious mechanical problems.

“I started doing some other checks to determine what was going on with the engine. I tried to restart it but it failed and I started to lose my altitude.”

He abandoned his second landing attempt after considering the distance of the runway and his rapidly decreasing altitude.

“If I tried to make it we would’ve gone into the bush, and if we landed anywhere on land it would’ve been a catastrophe because with that amount of fuel we had on board no one was going to walk away,” he said.

Captain Ferguson said he was making life and death decisions within seconds. His first move was to retract the landing gears and find shallow waters suitable to land in. 

“I wanted to land in the water but there was a big oil tanker up there. I was headed directly for the tanker and I had to decide whether I could fit between the tanker and shoreline. But between the tanker and the shoreline there might have been a boat or a cable connected to land. It was a dangerous prospect so I went on the side of the tanker and ended up landing on the Tongue of the Ocean side.

“I had to tell passengers we weren’t going to make it and will have to land on the water. Right away you could tell people had questions and were like, ‘Oh my God.’ But I couldn’t focus on them and what they were saying because I had to keep control. Even when in the water, if I had not controlled the landing and had gone down suddenly or head down the plane could’ve broken up and we would be unconscious, and so I had to maintain control.”

After landing successfully in the water, Captain Ferguson immediately got everyone off the aircraft and to safety.

“We were literally sitting on top of water,” he said. “When I looked around people were sitting there so I said, ‘Let’s get out here.’ I opened the exit and emergency doors and soon after water came in and everybody got out. About a minute later the top of the plane was already going under water. The lady who had texted her family came to me and said, ‘I can’t swim’, and so I saw my flight bag, brought it to her and she grabbed hold of it and hung onto it until a jet came. The older man who died had hung onto a seat that came out of the plane. He was alive when he came out of the plane but they told me they saw some kind of fluid coming out of his month. I figured he had a heart attack in the water or something. Everyone else was supporting one another and they had the little infant on top of their shoulder.”

The man who died was 77-year-old Selden Loring of Massachusetts; he was the sole fatality of the accident.

Married for 31 years, Captain Ferguson has three children, including two girls and a boy, and one grandson less than two months old.

Captain Ferguson said he has been trying to relax since the incident. “I’ve been trying to relax because I’ve experienced some back aches, throat aches, since I came out of the hospital. The doctors told me it would happen because I was trying to assist the passengers by getting them to safety,” he said.

Although he said he would “jump on a plane right now” because he is not discouraged by the experience, he admitted to becoming emotional when recalling it.

“I get overwhelmed sometimes sitting down reflecting on it. Tears would come to my eyes. There was a song I was singing going to the airport that morning called ‘Hallelujah, you have the victory’. I happened to hear that song playing during the funeral of Pastor Richard Pinder (on Tuesday) and I burst down crying because all I could remember was when the plane went into the water.”