A Good Samaritan’s swift action led to the rescue of a pilot and two children who survived nearly 12 hours stranded on the wing of their downed plane in a frigid Alaskan lake.
The small aircraft, a Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser, crashed into Tustumena Lake on Sunday during a sightseeing trip.
Terry Godes, after spotting a Facebook plea for help with the search, took to the skies Monday morning. Flying near the glacier-fed lake, he noticed what initially appeared to be wreckage.
“It kind of broke my heart to see that,” Godes said.
However, as he descended for a closer look, a glimmer of hope emerged. “I could see that there’s three people on top of the wing,” he said.
He then realized the trio were not only alive but also responsive, waving to him as he approached. Godes, after a brief prayer of thanks, radioed his discovery to other pilots involved in the search effort.
Dale Eicher, another pilot in the area, picked up Godes’s call and, recognizing his likely better cell service, relayed the information and coordinates to authorities. The Alaska National Guard swiftly responded, rescuing the pilot and his two children from their precarious perch on the submerged plane’s wing.
“I wasn’t sure if we would find them, especially because there was a cloud layer over quite a bit of the mountains so they could have very easily been in those clouds that we couldn’t get to,” Eicher said.
But he said that finding the family within an hour of starting the search and finding them alive “was very good news.”
The plane had taken off from Soldotna on Sunday for a sightseeing flight to Skilak Lake on the Kenai Peninsula. The cause of the crash remains under investigation.
The three survivors were taken to a hospital with injuries that were not considered life-threatening, Alaska State Troopers said.
“They spent a long, cold, dark, wet night out on top of a wing of an airplane that they weren’t planning on,” Godes said.
He said there were many miracles at play, from the plane not sinking, to the survivors being able to stay on the wing, to the three surviving the night in temperatures dipping into the 20s (subzero Celsius).
“It’s a cold dark place out there at night,” he said.
The plane was mostly submerged in the lake with only the wing and the top of the rudder exposed above the ice and water, Godes said.
The 60,000-acre (24,200-hectare) Tustumena Lake is situated about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage and has been described by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game as “notorious for its sudden, dangerous winds.”
Conditions around the lake — with nearby mountains, a glacier and gusty winds — can cause havoc for both boats and planes. The body of water is the largest freshwater lake on the Kenai Peninsula .
“Even under what would be considered a benign or relatively weak pressure gradient, the terrain helps turn the winds around, and occasionally they get a little squirrelly,” said Michael Kutz, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Anchorage.
Alaska is a state with few roads, leaving many communities to rely on small airplanes as the preferred mode of transportation.
In February, in western Alaska, 10 people died when a small commuter plane that was overweight by half a ton crashed into sea ice in the Norton Sound, near Nome on the state’s western coast.
Five years ago, a deadly midair collision near the Soldotna airport claimed the lives of seven people, including an Alaska state lawmaker.
