[Porsche-O-Phile]

That makes much more sense. I'm only land rated (although I'd love to pick up my ASES and AMES ratings someday) but I wondered about the guy's choice of takeoff direction. looked like he had a nice amount of clear water to use for takeoff facing directly into the wind, which given a choice would be the preferred direction and might have easily made the difference between getting airborne and bending metal. As a general rule, always take off & land into the wind. A crosswind never helps and as little as a 5 knot tailwind can make a huge difference on takeoff or landing distance. I'm sure these principles are the same for float planes.

Obviously if you're on a river or something your options for wind directions are more limited (kind of like a conventional runway) but the first video sure looked like the pilot had enough water in all directions to effectively give him choice of whatever takeoff direction he wanted, and if that's true he chose about the worst direction he could have, probably to ham it up for the camera.

I did a search on the N number and date in the NTSB database but there's no record found. Probably too recent to have the Preliminary Findings of Fact up. In my own experience it takes a few weeks (no, I've never had an incident/accident myself but I've been a witness).