Tom Tiffany spent about a quarter of an hour in Lake Wausau on Saturday night, waiting on a boat while the airplane he had been riding in went under behind him. He came out of it with stitches above his right eye, which is close to the best outcome available when a single-engine airplane loses power on approach in the dark.
By Sunday morning every national outlet was running the same two facts: he swam, and the Federal Aviation Administration will investigate. The question none of them put on the page is the one the night actually raises. Seven weeks before Wisconsin votes for governor, the Republican nominee was crossing the state after dark in a four-seat airplane designed in the 1950s, with one 73-year-old pilot at the controls and nobody in the other seat. That is not a scandal, and nobody did anything improper. It is simply the normal way American statewide campaigns move their candidates, and it is close to the arrangement that killed Senator Paul Wellstone eleven days before an election.
What Happened on Lake Wausau
The Marathon County Sheriff’s Office logged the report of a plane down at 8:49 p.m. Saturday. Tiffany, the sitting congressman for northern Wisconsin and his party’s nominee for governor, was flying home from the La Crosse County Lincoln Day Dinner, a drive of roughly three hours each way, when the airplane lost power on the approach to Wausau Downtown Airport. The pilot put the airplane on the water.
What followed is the part worth sitting with. They called 911 from inside the airplane, got out as it began to sink, swam to a shallow stretch and stood in the lake in the dark until a Wausau Fire Department airboat reached them at 9:05 p.m. Tiffany described the sequence himself in a post published that night:
After landing, we called 911. As the plane began to submerge, we exited the aircraft and swam to a shallow area, where we waited until emergency responders reached us by boat.
Both men were taken to Aspirus Wausau Hospital and treated for minor injuries, WSAW reported, with Tiffany needing stitches for a laceration above his right eye. The sheriff’s office identified the pilot as 73-year-old Leonard Boltz of Pearson, according to the Associated Press account carried by MPR News. Both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board have been notified. As of Sunday the airplane was still in the lake, inside a no-wake zone. David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive who won the Democratic primary last month by about 3,000 votes and faces Tiffany on November 3, wished him a fast recovery and praised the pilot.
Crowley is right about the pilot, and this deserves saying before anything critical follows. Whatever the NTSB eventually concludes about the engine, Boltz took a powerless airplane down onto black water at night and two people walked away from it. That is a better night’s work than most of the historical record contains.
The Airplane Was Built in 1959
The aircraft was a Beechcraft K35 Bonanza, a 1959 model year of which 436 were built, four seats, one 250-horsepower piston engine, and the distinctive V-tail that made the type famous. Sixty-seven-year-old airplanes fly legally and often fly beautifully, because an airframe is maintained rather than aged out. None of that is the issue.
The issue is what one engine and one pilot mean statistically. Scheduled US airlines flew all of 2024 with no onboard fatalities and a fatal accident rate of zero per 100,000 flight hours, according to NTSB data compiled by the Flight Safety Foundation. General aviation, the category Saturday’s flight falls into, runs around one fatal accident per 100,000 hours, and that figure is the good news: the FAA has called 2024 the safest general aviation year since it began tracking the rate in 2009.
The gap between those two numbers is not a gap in pilot character. It is redundancy. Airline flying means two qualified pilots, a second engine, a dispatcher watching the flight, and a maintenance regime with a regulator inside it. Private flying under Part 91 means a competent individual making good decisions with none of that behind him, and the federal rules treat the risk as personal rather than public, because on any ordinary Saturday it is. It stops being personal when the passenger is a sitting member of Congress who may be governor of Wisconsin in January.
The Pattern Nobody Named on Sunday
American politics has an unusually long casualty list from exactly this kind of flight, and it is strange how rarely anyone assembles it while a near miss is still in the news.
Wellstone died on October 25, 2002, when a chartered twin-engine aircraft went down near Eveleth, Minnesota, killing his wife, his daughter, three staff members and both pilots with the election eleven days out. Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan died weeks before the 2000 election in a small plane flown by his son, and Missouri elected him to the Senate anyway. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs and Representative Nick Begich vanished over Alaska in October 1972 and were never found. CNN’s running account of American politician plane fatalities counts more than a dozen national figures killed in air crashes since 1970, most of them on private or military aircraft rather than airliners.
The common thread is not bad luck. It is geography meeting a schedule. Candidates in large, rural states have to be in La Crosse at dinner and home in Wausau the same night, scheduled airlines do not fly that route on that clock, and the only tool that solves the problem is a small airplane belonging to somebody willing to fly it.
What Should Change Before November 3
Here is where we come down. Tiffany’s line that God was watching over them is a human thing to say at a hospital door at midnight, and we would not begrudge anyone it. It is also not an explanation, and it should not be where the story stops. Every serious statewide campaign in a state this size should be buying professionally crewed, two-pilot charter for night cross-state legs, and treating that line item as a basic cost of running rather than an indulgence. Both parties, not one. Wisconsin statewide races get decided by a point or two and pull in national money by the truckload, so nobody can pretend the stakes here are too small to justify the expense.
The press should also stop filing these as miracle stories. A ditching that ends with two people standing in a lake is a story about a pilot doing his job under the worst conditions of his career, inside a system that gave him no backup. Calling it divine intervention is a way of not asking why the backup was not there.
The FAA still has to examine the airplane before the NTSB decides whether the damage is substantial enough for a full investigation, so the technical answer about the engine is weeks or months away. The political answer is available now, and it is cheaper than the alternative. Tiffany has seven weeks of campaign travel left. So does Crowley.