A Wisconsin congressman running for governor ended his Saturday night by swimming out of a sinking plane in Lake Wausau. Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany was returning from a Lincoln Day Dinner in La Crosse County when his aircraft lost power on approach to Wausau Downtown Airport, went into the water, and started going under. Both Tiffany and the pilot got out, swam to a shallow area, and waited for emergency responders.
What Actually Happened Out There
According to CBS News, the Marathon County Sheriff's Office first reported a private plane down in Lake Wausau at approximately 9 p.m. local time Sunday. The FAA has since taken over the investigation, which is standard procedure any time an aircraft ends up somewhere it absolutely was not supposed to be.
Tiffany described the sequence of events himself in a social media post. The plane lost power on approach. The pilot made a decision. The plane went into the lake. Then it started sinking, which is the part where both men had to get themselves out and into the water before the aircraft took them with it.
CBS affiliate WSAW-TV was first on the scene with the initial report. The details that followed came straight from Tiffany himself, who, to his credit, was apparently lucid enough to compose a fairly coherent social media statement from a hospital bed after having just survived a plane crash.
The Pilot Deserves More Credit Than He's Getting
Let's be clear about something: the pilot in this story is the one who actually saved Tom Tiffany's life. When an aircraft loses power on approach and the runway is no longer a realistic option, the person flying it has a very small window to make a very bad choice slightly less bad. This pilot made that choice, put the plane in the lake instead of into a neighborhood or a tree line, and walked out alive.
Tiffany acknowledged this in his post, writing that he wanted to express his "deepest gratitude to the pilot, the Wausau Fire Department, and all of the first responders who came to our aid so quickly." Good. The pilot stuck a water landing in the dark in Wisconsin in September. The man deserves a parade.
Both Tiffany and the pilot were reported to have sustained only minor injuries, which is genuinely remarkable given the circumstances. These things do not always end this way.
His Democratic Opponent Did the Right Thing
David Crowley, the Democratic candidate Tiffany is running against in the Wisconsin governor's race, responded to the news with a statement that was exactly what it should have been. CBS News reports Crowley said he was "grateful to God that Congressman Tiffany and no one else was hurt in this horrifying incident, which could have been a tragedy if not for the heroism of the pilot."
No snark, no political maneuvering, no weird hedging. Just a clean statement of human decency. In 2026, that is apparently news in itself, so here we are, writing it down.
The two men are in an active race for governor of Wisconsin. That race will resume. Tonight, Crowley said the right thing, and it should be noted.
Tiffany's Statement, Annotated
From his hospital bed, Tiffany wrote: "God was watching over us tonight, and I am incredibly grateful to be here in the hospital with my wife, Chris, by my side. An experience like this reminds you just how precious life is."
He is not wrong. A plane losing power on approach to a small regional airport at 9 p.m. in the dark has approximately zero good outcomes built into it. The fact that the outcome here was "two guys swim to shallow water and wait for the fire department" instead of something considerably worse is, by any reasonable measure, extraordinary.
He was returning from the La Crosse County Lincoln Day Dinner, which is the kind of detail that makes the whole thing feel slightly surreal. You go to a political fundraiser dinner. You get in a plane. The plane loses power. You swim out of a lake. Then you post about it. This is apparently a day in the life of a congressional candidate in Wisconsin.
The Dingo Take
Tom Tiffany is a conservative Republican congressman from Wisconsin with whom this publication disagrees on a wide variety of policy matters. He is also a human being who got in a plane Sunday night, watched it lose power over a Wisconsin lake, swam out of the wreckage in the dark, and ended up in a hospital with his wife. Both of those things are true at the same time, and only one of them matters tonight.
The story here is not political. It is a pilot making a split-second call that saved two lives, a fire department responding fast enough to matter, and two men walking out of a situation that had no business ending cleanly. The FAA will investigate what caused the power loss. That investigation will take time. None of that is the point right now.
Tiffany will be back on the campaign trail soon enough, and we will have plenty of opportunity to argue about his politics then. Tonight he is a guy who survived something that kills people, and his opponent handled the news with basic human grace, and the pilot who actually flew that plane into water instead of into the ground deserves to have his name in every version of this story. We don't have it yet. When we do, it should be at the top.
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