A pilot survived after crashing an ultralight aircraft into the Caloosahatchee River near Fort Myers on Sunday afternoon.
Victor Coletta, 68, a former commercial airline pilot, walked away from the crash with four fractured vertebrae and a minor cut.
An officer from the Fort Myers Police Department spotted the pilot sitting on the aircraft floating in the water near the I-75 bridge. The officer rescued the pilot and towed the aircraft back to shore.
"He said, 'You're lucky that this is all that happened to you. That was this first thing you know, you can end up paralyzed with something like this,'" Coletta said.
"A lot of people will buy these things and attempt to fly them and end up killing themselves," said Coletta.
The pilot went to the hospital later that afternoon.
"They said I had fractured four vertebrae in my back. So they wanted me to stay there. And I said, I, I can't stay there. I have a dog at home and there's nobody to take care of them as I have to go," said Coletta.
The pilot said he was trying to land at 30 feet in the air, but he accidentally pulled the lever when landing instead of pushing it, causing him to nosedive down into the water.
"The controls on a weight shift machine like this are backwards from what I'm used to flying," Coletta said. "Rather than pushing forward, I pulled back and I just drove it like at a 45-degree angle right into the water."
The pilot said he is not going to be flying an ultralight aircraft again.