A Chattanooga pilot’s dead battery caused confusion Thursday afternoon, with some media reporting that the plane crash landed in a river, when in fact there was no emergency landing.
Pilot Peter Serodino landed his sea plane normally in the Tennessee River near Decatur on Thursday afternoon and did about an hour of routine work, he told the Times Free Press.
But when he was ready to head out, he realized his plane’s battery was dead and he couldn’t restart the engine.
He got a tow from the local marine patrol, and then recharged his battery at a local marina.
Local emergency personnel responded to the scene – a plane floating in the river – after bystanders reported a crash landing on the water. But there was no emergency landing, Serodino said.
“It was a normal landing,” Serodino said.
Decatur Police Lt. Jeremy Hayes said that drivers on a local highway panicked when Serodino flew low over the road and called authorities to say that the plane was crashing.
But he said law enforcement quickly realized there was no crash.
“He didn’t crash, he didn’t have a hard landing,” he said. “I don’t know where our press got that bit.”
But he added that Serodino picked a bad spot to put his plane down.
“Was he in danger?” he said. “Yes. Because there are stumps right under the water there and if he had hit one, then we would have been responding to a crash.”