All wet

Getting a seaplane rating is a joy. The act of taking off and landing on the water is poetic. Few things in aviation—or in life—are more stirring or sublime.

The places you can reach in seaplanes—especially the amphibious kind—make the possibilities for adventure and exploration feel boundless. Downtown Seattle, the San Francisco waterfront, New York City, arctic Canada, Alaska, and the Caribbean are just beginnings.

The downside of the seaplane rating, however, is the superficial and incomplete nature of the training that goes into it. No other rating leaves the certificate holder so thoroughly unprepared for the things that they’re likely to encounter in the real world once they’ve obtained the rating itself. Seaplane training involves lots of flying, plenty of takeoffs and landings, some different kinds of taxiing, and a bit of docking and beaching. If things go well, all the required training can be done in a single fun-filled weekend.

Once a newly minted seaplane pilot ventures out beyond the familiar confines of their training area, however, they’re sure to find new and novel situations that their instructors and examiner didn’t address.

Among them: Getting on and off docks without dinging the floats when it’s windy or the current is swift; avoiding pilings that grow taller at low tide; tying secure knots that hold a seaplane firmly yet can still be untied quickly at the right moment; backing up or “sailing” onto a beach; mooring; anchoring, or hot-starting a fuel-injected engine after leaving a dock in a marina full of expensive and fragile obstacles are just a few of the challenges that await.

I’m aware of these seaplane pitfalls because I’ve made a hash out of all of them—and more—during my initial forays into unsupervised seaplane ops.

Once, while ingloriously sprawled prone on a wet dock trying to keep a Super Cub from drifting away by holding onto one of its floats with my toes, I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed by my painful and precarious situation—as well as the inadequacy of the training (or lack of it) that put me there.

Here’s another true confession: The half-dozen or so seaplane pilots I’ve personally trained for that rating were no better prepared than me when they passed their checkrides. We only had a short time, so I taught to the test and promised to get to the advanced lessons later.

The reason we don’t teach the hard parts of seaplane flying is because, well, they’re hard. And potentially costly, too.

There’s a significant chance—bordering on certainty—when learning docking, for example, that the trainee will approach a dock too fast and whack it with a float. Such scrapes and dents don’t easily buff out. Someone’s going to slip while attempting to tie off on a mooring. The leading edge of a wing may smack a piling. The water rudders will get bent when backing onto a beach, and the bottoms of the floats will grind against sharp-edged rocks hidden just below the water’s surface.

All this mayhem doesn’t even address the true nightmare scenarios of touching down in an amphib with the wheels in the wrong position. A gear-up landing on a paved runway is embarrassing. A gear-down landing on water is infinitely worse. And dropping a wallet, camera, or iPhone in the water at some point is virtually guaranteed.

Who would voluntarily subject an airplane to those kinds of risks just to teach skills that aren’t even required on a seaplane checkride?

My humble suggestion for the right way forward is this: Eliminate the seaplane rating entirely. Make the seaplane qualification a checkout and CFI endorsement just as we do with tailwheel, high-performance, and complex airplane signoffs.

Designated pilot examiners are in critically short supply anyway. Hand off seaplane training and signoffs to experienced flight instructors who can delve into real-world situations that prepare pilots to fly in the confounding conditions they’re sure to face on the water.

In Canada, a place with a long and storied seaplane tradition, there’s no such thing as a seaplane rating. Canadian pilots fly on and off the water with hard-earned, practical endorsements for water flying, not ratings.

Flying seaplanes after earning an endorsement like our neighbors to the north will be just as demanding and rewarding as this exquisite brand of aviation has always been. And seaplane flying will be more accessible without the stress, expense, and complication of a checkride at the end of a cursory training program.

Let’s give future seaplane pilots more and better training instead of a meaningless test.

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