ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A pilot and his two young daughters survived on the wing of a plane for about 12 hours after it crashed and was partially submerged in an icy Alaska lake, then were rescued after being spotted by a good Samaritan.
Terry Godes said he saw a Facebook post Sunday night calling for people to help search for the missing plane, which did not have a locator beacon. On Monday morning about a dozen pilots including Godes headed out to scour the rugged terrain. Godes headed toward Tustumena Lake near the toe of a glacier and spotted what he thought was wreckage.
“It kind of broke my heart to see that, but as I got closer down and lower, I could see that there’s three people on top of the wing,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “They were alive and responsive and moving around,” Godes said, adding that they waved at him.
The missing Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser, piloted by a man with two juvenile immediate family members aboard, was on a sightseeing tour from Soldotna to Skilak Lake on the Kenai Peninsula. It was not immediately clear how old the juveniles were.
In a social media post early Monday, John Morris implored people to help search for his son and granddaughters, saying they were late returning from a Sunday afternoon flight. “There are friends ready to search at daylight. But this is my plea for any and all help to locate my family,” he wrote.
The three were rescued on the eastern edge of Tustumena Lake on Monday by the Alaska Army National Guard after Godes alerted other searching pilots that he had found it. Another pilot, Dale Eicher, heard Godes’ radio call and related it to troopers since he was closer to Skilak Lake and figured he had better cell reception. He was also able to provide the plane’s coordinates to authorities.
“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 finding the family alive within an hour of starting the search “was very good news.” The three were taken to a hospital with injuries that were not considered life-threatening, Alaska State Troopers said.
Godes said many miracles were at play, from the plane not sinking, to the survivors being able to stay atop the wing, to them surviving nighttime temperatures dipping into the 20s (subzero Celsius). “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.
Alaska has few roads, leaving many communities to rely on small airplanes to get around. Last month 10 people died when a small commuter plane that was overweight by half a ton crashed onto sea ice in the Norton Sound, near Nome on the state’s western coast. And five years ago, a midair collision near the Soldotna airport claimed seven lives including that of a state lawmaker.
