ANCHORAGE, Alaska — A pilot and his two young girls were able to stay alive on the wing of a plane that had crashed and was partially submerged in an icy Alaskan lake for about 12 hours before someone saw them and came to their aid.
Terry Godes said that he saw a post on Facebook late Sunday night asking people to help look for the lost plane that didn’t have a locator beacon. On Monday morning, Godes and a few other pilots set out to search the rough territory. Godes went toward Tustumena Lake, which was close to the base of a glacier, and saw what he thought was broken-down equipment.
“That kind of broke my heart to see,” he told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “But as I got closer and lower, I could see that there are three people on top of the wing.”
He kept walking toward her after saying a prayer and saw a miracle.
“They were alert, moving, and alive,” Godes said, adding that they waved at him.
The lost Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser was being flown by a man with two young family members. They were on a sightseeing trip from Soldotna to Skilak Lake on the Kenai Peninsula. It wasn’t clear right away how old the kids were.
John Morris asked people on social media early Monday to help look for his son and granddaughters, saying they were late getting back from a flight on Sunday afternoon.
“Friends are ready to look during the day.” “But this is my plea for all help to find my family,” he wrote.
The Alaska Army National Guard found and saved the three people on the eastern shore of Tustumena Lake on Monday, after Godes told other planes looking for them that he had found them. Dale Eicher, another pilot, heard Godes’ radio call and told the cops about it because he was closer to Skilak Lake and thought he would have better cell service. He was also able to give the police the plane’s coordinates.
Eicher said, “I wasn’t sure if we would find them because there was a layer of clouds over a lot of the mountains. They could have been in those clouds that we couldn’t get to.” But it “was very good news” that the family was found living only an hour after the search began.
Alaska State Troopers said that the three were taken to the hospital with injuries that were not thought to be life-threatening.
Godes said that many miracles were happening, such as the fact that the plane didn’t sink and the survivors were able to stay on top of the wing even though it got below zero at night.
There was a long, cold, dark, and wet night spent on top of an airplane wing that they had not planned, Godes said.
Alaska doesn’t have many roads, so people in many places depend on small planes to get around.
A small commuter plane that was half a ton overweight fell into sea ice in Norton Sound, near Nome on the western coast of the state, last month, killing ten.
Over five years ago, there was an accident in the sky near the Soldotna airport that killed seven people, including a politician from the state.
The National Guard sent a helicopter from its base in Anchorage to help with this week’s rescue.
“The first plan to use a hoist to pull them off the wing was too risky because the wind from the helicopter was whipping the little girl around,” said Lt. Col. Brendon Holbrook, commander of the 207th Aviation Regiment. Instead, the plane circled off to the side and pulled them on board.
People who worked with them said the girls were surprisingly dry, but Holbrook said the man had been in the water at some point and was “hypothermic.”
Holbrook said he was told they had basic clothes like you’d find on small planes without very good heating systems, but nothing that would keep them warm outside in the winter when the wind was blowing across the lake.
“It was literally the best thing that could have happened,” Holbrook said. “That plane’s crew was lucky in the end because, from what my guys told me, the tail had frozen over while the plane was in the ice; if it hadn’t frozen over, the plane would have sunk.”
Tustumena Lake, which is 60,000 acres (24,200 hectares) and the largest freshwater body on the Kenai Peninsula, is about 80 miles (130 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage. There are mountains and a glacier nearby.
“Notorious for its sudden, dangerous winds,” according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The weather can be terrible for both boats and planes.
“The terrain helps turn the winds around, and sometimes they get a little crazy,” said Michael Kutz, a meteorologist in Anchorage for the National Weather Service.
Godes agreed that it is always windy there and the water can get rough.
“Then the way it’s set up right there at the heel or toe of that glacier, with mountains on both sides, and just a few miles to the west, Cook Inlet goes back and forth every day with huge changes in temperature and tide,” he said. “It’s just a recipe for trouble and chaos.”
There were still no signs of what caused the plane to crash.
Mark Ward is an investigator with the Alaska section of the National Transportation Safety Board. He said that the pilot had not yet reported the accident and that the agency had not been able to get in touch with him. On Wednesday, people would try to talk to him again.
