“On 27 July 2019 I crashed my plane in the remote wilderness of Quebec. I was rescued 5 hours later by Canadian Heroes.”
Wild footage from an American pilot whose plane went down in the remote Quebec wilderness. Matt Lehtinen was flying along in his Cirrus SR22 when he experienced engine failure and had to ditch between Wabush, Nfld., and Quebec City. Luckily he had a whole plane parachute system aka CAPS which he deployed successfully. CTVNEWS reports:
“CAPS stands for Cirrus Airframe Parachute System. It’s a recovery system designed to slow the descent of a plane if it starts to go down and to soften the landing. The parachute is attached to the plane itself. Lehtinen believes pulling the parachute is one of the reasons he is alive today.”
He survived the parachute landing but it was a close one. The force of the impact split the door of the plane in half and a tree punched up through the bottom of the airplane as it slammed into the forest.
“It actually was so close that it scraped my leg and ripped my shorts. So only a few inches to one direction would have been probably a fatal type of injury.”
Lehtinen proceeded to send an SOS on his GPS and start a fire hoping to create enough smoke to signal emergency help. The Royal Canadian Air Force responded and dropped a radio to Lehtinen from an RCAF plane.
All in all, Lehtinen was stranded in the wilderness for five hours. His hope is that by releasing the footage it could be helpful to others but right now he is mostly focused on feeling thankful:
“I quite possibly would have been there for many days and I did not have the supplies to survive for many days. Words can’t express the gratitude I feel towards everyone that was involved to rescue me. And there were many, many people involved.”
images from Cirrus