AK National Guard Pulls Three from the Wing of a Partially Submerged Piper PA-12

After crashing in an icy Alaska lake, a pilot and his two young children were forced to spend a night perched atop their partially-submerged Piper PA-12’s wing. They were rescued after around 12 hours, thanks to a couple of concerned aviators and the Alaska Army National Guard.

The plane, a Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser registered N3342M, reportedly took off from Soldotna Municipal Airport (SXQ) for a sightseeing tour of Skilak Lake and the surrounding Kenai Peninsula. However, after not returning on time, the pilot’s father took to social media to ask for help finding his son and two granddaughters.

“There are friends ready to search at daylight. But this is my plea for any and all help to locate my family,” he stated.

Local pilot Terry Godes and around a dozen others saw the post and took off the following day, on March 24, to look for the missing three. Godes headed south of Soldotna towards Tutsumena Lake - a 60,000-acre water body notorious for strong, unpredictable winds due to nearby mountains and glaciers. He quickly noticed what looked like 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 explained. “They were alive and responsive and moving around.”

With the help of Dale Eicher, another pilot who relayed Godes’s radio call to authorities, the Alaska Army National Guard began to form its rescue plan. Initially, officials hoped to use a helicopter to hoist the stranded family from the wing. However, with one of the young girls being blown around by the helicopter’s downwash, the aircraft hovered alongside the wreckage and pulled them inside.

The three were transported to a hospital in stable condition, though the father seemed to have taken a dip in the water at some point and was hypothermic.

“It was literally the best possible scenario and outcome,” stated Lt. Col. Brendon Holbrook, commander of the 207th Aviation Troop Command. “Ultimately the crew of that airplane were lucky, because from what my guys told me, that plane was in the ice with the tail refrozen, and if that tail hadn’t refrozen, it would have sunk.”

FMI: https://ak.ng.mil