Faith Tenkley brought a small plane down in the Atlantic Ocean off Boca Raton on Saturday after a landing gear malfunction forced her into a water landing that ended with a fast rescue and no reported injuries. The 23-year-old pilot was the only person aboard the single-engine aircraft.
The plane went down near 250 South Ocean Blvd. at about 9:40 a.m. local time, and a lifeguard reached Tenkley within about a minute. A Boca Raton Ocean Rescue fire boat followed closely behind, and Tenkley was later taken to a hospital as a precaution.
That quick response is what turned a potentially far worse crash into a survivable emergency. Tenkley had been flying for four years and had left Page Field in Fort Myers for Bimini in the Bahamas to pick up her parents when she began having mechanical problems about 15 miles west of Boca Raton.
She first planned to divert to Boca Raton Airport, but the landing gear malfunctioned and she worried a hard runway landing could ignite the plane, which had recently been refueled. She then maneuvered her family's twin-engine Piper around buildings as she approached the coast and avoided paddleboarders before finding an open stretch of water beside the beach.
That is also where the story briefly slipped out of the facts and into online noise. Video of the rescue led some people to think a male pilot had been saved by a female surfer, but Tenkley later wanted to clear up that confusion. She told Gulf Coast News' Peter Busch that she had been wearing a long skirt over a bikini, took off the skirt to swim to shore, and was seen by people on the beach as a woman who might have been rescuing someone else.
The confusion matters because the real story is not a beach rumor. It is a rare emergency landing made under pressure, a rescue measured in seconds, and a pilot who walked away without injury after putting a damaged plane down on open water and getting help almost immediately. What investigators still have not said is what caused the mechanical issues that started the chain of events in the first place.
