Amphibious operations by their very nature include two transitions, not just one, between the wolds of air, land and sea. Until someone comes up with a foolproof procedures for amphibious operations, the only way to prevent these mishaps is to cock some sort trigger mechanism to get the pilot to stop, to clear his mind of everything trashing around in there, and to think about what he's transition from and to before doing it.
A bedtime story for amphib fliers.
A young lad who lived near the sea was on his lunch-break watching birds circling his father's freshly plowed field. The sky-critters regularly swooped down and carried off worms. He was awestruck, and decided he wanted to fly, too. He built a flying machine, took to the skies, and even came back down and survived contact with the ground. When he related his achievement to all the disbelievers, he had to quickly think of a word that would best describe his return to Earth. So being a product of a seafaring culture, it seemed natural to adopt the verb “to land” his forefathers used to label the transitioning from their liquid world to the solid. And so the word “land” and “landing” was adopted to label transitioning from the gaseous world to the solid, too.
The new term was perfect. It was well known and used, and conveyed the intended concept well. But then one day he saw an albatross sailing the wind over the seashore, so graceful and detached, searching for that perfect inflight-meal to swoop down on. God's magnificent creature could not only alight on the water but take to the air, too. Once again he felt empty. Something was still missing from his life. He kept scratching his head. How could he do that with his flying machine?
It didn't take him long to figure out that if were to trade-in his wheels for a boat under his airplane, he could do that too. But then he saw his model in nature, the gooney-bird, attempt a landing on the shore, a disastrous feat at best. So he realized that the transition from the air to solid ground for his man-made water-fowl needed some sort of improvement over nature's model. So he decided to put wheels under the boat his airplane sat on, and test flew his invention. Though he didn't know it, proto-amphibious aviation was born.
It didn't take long before he was transitioning not just from the ground to the air and back, but also from the sea to the the air and back by putting on and removing the wheels - the first changeover - from his flying machine . But then one day after he took off from the sea, the wind picked up and the waves were just too high to risk a water “landing.” He had no choice: he had to land on the shore, and gave a performance not unlike his model in nature.
After his hospital recovery, he rebuilt his airplane, but this time he rigged a contraption between the boat and its wheels he could now activate to lower or retract his wheels at will. His ecstasy reached new heights when he realized he could not only take off from the water and land on the shore, but the other way around, too. Moreover, he could even go, albeit slowly, from the beach into the water and also back onto the beach. He called his creation the “amphibious” airplane.
Crowds gathered at events he organized to show-off his invention. Flight after flight, he successfully transitioned between the three realms, solid, gas, liquid, always referring to the transition from the gaseous world as the “landing.” Successfully, that is until his self-contentment flooded his thoughts and he forgot to ask the most basic of operational questions, “what is it that I want to do?” Had he asked that fundamental question, he would have heard the answer “to transition from the air to the water.” But he didn't. Instead, he came up with a new crowd-pleaser when he flipped over in the water with his wheels extended.
He had much time in his cast to meditate on the underlying causes of his mishap. “Was all that effort to rig a multi-realm 'landing' gear wasted?” - he pondered while being stretched a little taller in traction. “And how about a reverse situation: landing on the beach with the wheels retracted?” He had already tried that once and didn't like that either. His meditation paid off. He recalled instructing his students to obey his commands, including implementing his decision to touch down or not after assessing the size of waves. He remembered one foggy day when he was happy with the surface conditions and gave his student the command, “Land!” His student then promptly executed a go-around. When questioned, the student replied, he didn't see any “land” but figured his instructor must have spotted terra-firma in the fog he didn't want to crash into.
And so he concluded that the words “land” and “landing,” retained in his subconscious from his seafaring ancestors' vocabulary and so successful in land-only operations was responsible for his moment of absentmindedness when was ready to “land.” So he decided to put an end to the use of that term and came up with a foolproof one. He coined a new word for transitioning from the air to the water that would unmistakably remind him what what environment he's transitioning to.
Unfortunately, he didn't survive his injuries, so no one knows what that term was. However, by studying other languages, amphibious aviators have been working on phraseology that would trigger the right mindset, a word that would fire at the appropriate time and point to the correct procedure for the planned transition. Maybe someone from supercub.org already has a few ideas...
Without suggesting any, let me point out that in French, to land on water is called “amerrire,” (as opposed to “atterrir” for landing a land) from the root word “mer,” sea (which incidentally but intuitively begins with a letter that looks like waves). Other languages might have even more intuitive words to trigger the right procedure. Either way, the first step ought to be a total break away from the word “land” and all of its forms whenever other than land-only operations are contemplated. Until then, pictures such as the above will, unfortunately, continue to remind us of the need to add two words in big red letters to end of before takeoff and before landing checklists: STOP!... THINK!
Goodnight kids. Dream safely.
