'The engine just went silent': Then, this B.C. pilot had 3 minutes to react

For more than a month, Canadian pilot Michael MacDonald had taken a marine biologist on daily flights over Mexico's Gulf of California, surveying the sea for wildlife. 

Thirty-three of those flights went smoothly. About three hours into the 34th, things went south. 

MacDonald, who is now safe at home in Burnaby, B.C., is recounting the seconds, minutes and hours after he realized the engine in his small aircraft had quit, and how far he and his passenger were from land. 

The pair were soaring at about 457 metres above the ocean, just low enough so they could see all kinds of whales, orcas, dolphins and turtles, on April 18.

Three hours into the four-hour flight, "the engine just went silent," MacDonald recalled. 

"I just immediately turned left 90 degrees, because that was the closest to the land," he told Gloria Macarenko, the host of CBC's On The Coast. 

They were about 11 kilometres away from the shore, and falling about 150 metres per minute, MacDonald said. 

"Three minutes is all we had left to play with."

He spent about 90 seconds trying to figure out what had gone wrong in the four-seater Cessna 182. When nothing worked, he knew they were going to hit the water. 

MacDonald, 47, has been flying since 2012, and the procedure around what to do in the event of a crash landing has been drilled into him. 

"We talk about it a lot, about the possibility of ditching," he said. "Every day we go over a briefing and remember how to do this procedure, that procedure and make sure that we know what we're doing."

MacDonald, 47, passed a pillow to his passenger so she could cover her face to protect herself from debris. 

They tightened their harnesses and prepared for impact. 

MacDonald remembers trying to navigate the big swells in the ocean.