A 23-year-old pilot with four years of flight experience brought her family's twin-engine plane down in the ocean just off a crowded Florida beach after losing her landing gear and an engine, and emerged without a scratch.
Faith Tenkley had taken off alone from Fort Myers on Saturday morning, headed roughly 150 miles east to pick up her parents in the Bahamas. About 15 miles off Boca Raton, the Piper PA30 started falling apart on her. The landing gear broke. The right engine quit. She was flying a recently refueled aircraft with no way to touch down on a runway without risking a fire.
So she put it in the water. At approximately 9:40 a.m., Tenkley guided the crippled plane into the Atlantic near South Beach Park in Boca Raton, dodging buildings and paddleboarders on the way down. A lifeguard reached her within one minute. A Boca Raton Ocean Rescue fire rescue boat arrived close behind. Boca Raton police confirmed no injuries. Tenkley was taken to a local hospital as a precaution.
Beachgoers had no warning. Maria Marks was applying sunscreen to her child when the plane appeared overhead. She told WPBF:
"One second I'm spraying sunscreen on my kid. The next I'm looking up and saying, 'Is that supposed to be happening?'"
Alexis Arizzi, who was on a boat nearby, described the plane making a "slow descent" before it "delicately landed" on the water. Arizzi notified the Coast Guard after watching the aircraft go down.
A pilot who happened to be on the beach, and who asked not to be identified, offered a professional assessment of Tenkley's performance:
"The most important part they teach you in emergency support or anything is to fly the airplane all the way down. Based on the fact that it's all in one piece... it seems like the pilot did that."
That judgment matters. A twin-engine plane hitting the ocean can break apart on impact, flip, or cartwheel. Tenkley kept it intact. She walked away. Not every small-plane emergency ends that way.
Tenkley told Gulf Coast Now that she had initially planned to make an emergency landing at Boca Raton. But once she realized the landing gear was broken and the plane had been recently refueled, she ruled out a runway approach. A gear-up landing on pavement with full fuel tanks risked sparking a fire. The ocean, for all its dangers, gave her a better shot.
She was 23 years old, alone in the cockpit, managing two simultaneous mechanical failures over open water near a populated coastline. She picked her spot, avoided the people below, and controlled the descent. Four years of training did what four years of training is supposed to do.
Aviation incidents involving small aircraft have drawn steady attention in recent years. Fatal crashes near coastlines are a grim reminder of how narrow the margin is between a controlled landing and a catastrophe.
A social media user who goes by Craig on X, posting under the handle @SCHDETF, captured video of the landing. He had been running on the beach when the plane flew past him. He recorded the descent, ran down the shoreline, and saw Tenkley safely on shore. He then watched the plane begin to sink.
"🤯Wow! A small plane flew right past me while I was running, and I recorded it making an emergency landing in the ocean near South Beach Park in Boca Raton, Florida. I ran down the beach and caught up to it, saw the passenger safely on shore and watched the plane begin sinking..."
Boca Raton's emergency response was swift. The lifeguard who reached Tenkley within a minute of the water landing, followed by the Ocean Rescue fire boat, kept the situation from escalating. The Coast Guard was notified, though it remains unclear whether Coast Guard units responded on scene or what role they played beyond receiving the initial report from Arizzi.
Several details remain unresolved. The cause of both the landing gear failure and the right engine shutdown has not been publicly explained. Whether the FAA or the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that investigates civil aviation accidents, has opened an investigation is not addressed in available reporting. The status of the Piper PA30 itself, last seen sinking off South Beach Park, is unknown. Water landings involving small aircraft typically trigger federal review, but no agency has commented publicly on next steps.
Tenkley's condition after her hospital evaluation has not been reported. Boca Raton police confirmed she had no injuries at the scene, and every witness account describes her walking away under her own power.
The Piper PA30 is a light twin-engine aircraft, a workhorse of private aviation, not a commercial jet. Losing one engine is survivable if the pilot keeps composure. Losing the landing gear on top of it narrows the options to almost nothing. Tenkley found the one option that worked.
Small-plane flying carries real risk, and aviation accidents at every scale carry consequences that extend well beyond the cockpit. Saturday's outcome in Boca Raton was the rare exception, a mechanical disaster met by a pilot who kept her head and a rescue team that showed up fast.
In a country that spends plenty of time cataloging failure, it is worth pausing for a moment when someone, a 23-year-old flying alone over the Atlantic, does exactly what she was trained to do, under pressure most people will never face, and gets it right.
