Alaska’s tight-knit community of bush pilots came together in a big way this week to help save one of their own. Thanks to their coordination and efforts, the Alaska National Guard was able to rescue a missing pilot and his two daughters, who’d crashed into a frozen lake on the Kenai Peninsula Sunday night. They’d spent around 12 hours on one of the wings of the partially submerged plane by the time the airborne cavalry arrived, according to the Associated Press.
The National Guard confirmed with Alaska’s News Source that the pilot and his daughters were rescued from the half-sunken plane around 10:30 a.m. Monday, and taken directly to a hospital, where they were treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
The plane was first reported missing around 10:30 p.m. Sunday by the pilot’s father, John Morris. This kicked off a series of social media posts by family friends and other concerned locals, some of whom joined the effort to search in their own planes Monday morning.
“I’m proud of the guys that stepped up and went out and helped out,” a family friend and one of the original posters, Scott Holmes, told reporters. “My daughter told me there was 420 shares on my post.”
Terry Godes, of Soldotna, was “one of the guys,” and the pilot who first got eyes on the crashed plane. Godes tells Outdoor Life that he’d seen another Facebook post by his friend Leonard Perry late Sunday night. Perry asked anyone who was able to help search for the missing plane to rally at first light on Monday.
“He is a friend of mine, and if he asks for help on a search, and I’m available, I’m in,” says Godes, who flies a special kind of Super Cub, a StolQuest 2. “So I contacted him Monday morning to coordinate our flights.”
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The missing pilot and his daughters, who have not been identified, were reportedly on a sightseeing trip from Soldotna to Skilak Lake when their Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser went down Sunday evening. Tustumena Lake, which sits at the foot of Tustumena Glacier, was their last known cellular location, according to Dale Eicher, another local pilot who was involved in the search and shared details with ANS.
“There were half a dozen other [pilots] that were in the air between Skilak and Tustumena,” Godes says of the coordinated search. “I was just the guy that saw the plane first.”
He told the AP he was heartbroken when he first saw the wreckage. Then Godes saw the three figures on the wing waving at him, and he immediately radioed in their location. Eicher, who heard the call on his radio and was still in cell range (unlike Godes), relayed the GPS coordinates to the Alaska State Troopers. The Troopers then coordinated with the National Guard, which sent out a C-130 transport plane and a rescue helicopter.
“The C-130 guys and the ones in the chopper should really get the credit,” Godes says. “They had to come up with a non-standard recovery because the ice was too soft to land on, and the rotor wash threatened to blow the children off their safe perch on the wing.
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“They performed a flawless, one-off recovery,” he adds. “Those guys are solid!”
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