A veteran aviator who once served as mayor of Bethel was among the four people killed when a single-engine Piper PA-24 came down in shallow tidal water beside the remote coastal town of Seldovia, Alaska. The plane went into the Seldovia Slough on August 26, 2026, and Alaska State Troopers, who have since identified everyone aboard, were notified at about 1:18 p.m.
At the controls was Eric Middlebrook, 68, of Anchorage. His three passengers had all traveled up from the San Francisco Bay Area: Ronald Schmidt, 65, and Lance Schmidt, 20, both of San Jose, and Daniel Simons, 82, who made his home in Los Gatos. None of the four survived. Ronald Schmidt was Middlebrook’s brother. Schmidt told the Appeal-Democrat of Marysville, California, in a 2008 profile that the Associated Press later cited that Middlebrook was one of his six siblings. How the two Schmidts were related to each other has not been reported, and the San Francisco Chronicle said the relationship was not immediately clear.
The aircraft, a 1971 Piper PA-24-260 Comanche registered to Middlebrook as N9485P, had taken off from Merrill Field Airport in Anchorage bound for Seldovia. That destination, a small community on the far side of Kachemak Bay, sits roughly 135 miles to the southwest, and the flight never reached it. The plane instead came to rest underwater just off the shoreline — in about 15 feet, the safety board told the Associated Press, though investigators gave other outlets figures ranging from 13 to 17 feet — with its outline still visible beneath the surface of the slough.
A Recovery Delayed by the Tide
Where the plane landed turned the response into a waiting game. Crews had no way to reach it until the water dropped. When the tide finally pulled back, troopers got to the fuselage and brought out all four bodies, then sent the remains to the state medical examiner’s office for autopsy.
Video shot at the scene showed the submerged plane sitting in the slough, and footage from the following day captured a helicopter hoisting the wreckage clear of the water. People nearby said they heard the plane take off, then heard it crash. One described an aftermath that left onlookers terrified as they waited to learn whether anyone aboard had survived.
No road reaches Seldovia. Residents and visitors arrive by boat or by air, which turns the town’s small airport — and the pilots who fly into it — into a lifeline rather than a convenience.
A Longtime Pilot and Former Mayor
Alaska aviation knew Middlebrook, and so did Alaska civic life. Bethel is a second-class city whose mayor is chosen by the city council from among its own members rather than elected directly, and Middlebrook held the post twice in the hub community of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Accounts of when differ: the Associated Press says he became mayor in 2006, while the public broadcaster KYUK and other records put his first term in 2008. Both agree on a second term from October 2010 to October 2011. He ran a commercial refrigeration business, and for years he flew his own plane out to villages scattered along the Kuskokwim to repair coolers and freezers — unglamorous work that keeps food cold and supply chains intact in places with no roads in or out.
Decades in Alaska had earned him a reputation as an experienced pilot. Middlebrook graduated from Marysville High School in Northern California in 1975 — the same region his three passengers called home — and moved north in 1981 after visiting a friend. “His job basically was to keep the ice cream frozen in the village stores,” said Mark Springer, a Bethel City Council member and former mayor, who called him the go-to man for refrigeration work across the delta. “He had his own airplane, and he would fly out to the villages to do refrigeration repair.”
Grief from the crash has carried south to the Bay Area, home to the Schmidts and Simons. Ronald Schmidt and Lance Schmidt shared a San Jose address. Simons, at 82, was the oldest of the four aboard. Alaska State Troopers released the names on August 27, after next of kin were notified.
What Investigators Know So Far
What brought the plane down is now the subject of an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which has been careful to say it does not yet know. Clint Johnson, who runs the board’s Alaska office, put the caveat first when he spoke the day after the crash. “What we’re hearing now, and we’re not drawing any conclusions, that there may have been an attempted go-around,” he said. “The circumstances that surround that, we don’t know.” A day later he was blunter: “There’s a lot of different stories coming in. We didn’t know if this happened on landing, if it was on a go-around, if it was on departure.” The Anchorage Daily News reported that the plane hit trees before going into the water, quoting Johnson: “In the process of the go-around, they struck trees and ultimately fell into the slough.” Federal Aviation Administration data for the Seldovia airport lists trees off both runway ends — 158 feet tall and 1,735 feet out on the Runway 16 approach, 89 feet and 995 feet out on Runway 34. NTSB investigations routinely take months to produce a factual report and longer still to reach a probable cause.
Investigators generally work through the airframe and engine, the weather at the time, the pilot’s flight history and whatever radar or witness data exists before they conclude. The wreckage lifted out of the slough will sit at the center of that effort.
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan of Alaska called the crash “horrendous” and said his thoughts were with the families. Pointing to the federal investigators on the ground, he added: “We have the NTSB up here, FAA doing the investigation. But we’ve got to keep making the investments.” In a social media post he wrote that “these tragedies are heartbreaking and unacceptable, which is why aviation safety and infrastructure in Alaska continue to be a top focus of mine.” Nowhere else in the country leans on small aircraft the way Alaska does. The Federal Aviation Administration puts the share of communities in its Alaskan Region that are not connected by road at 82 percent, and that dependence has held air safety close to the center of state politics for generations.
Less than a week before the Seldovia crash, a separate fatal plane accident in southwest Alaska killed eight people. Those eight died August 20 when a chartered twin-engine Cessna 441 Conquest went down on mountainous terrain west of the runway at the Cape Newenham Long Range Radar Site during a second landing attempt, in fog and mist. The safety board said conditions had gone from 10 miles of visibility and a 900-foot ceiling at 9 a.m. to fog, mist and poor visibility by the time of the crash; Robert Stone, an Anchorage aviation attorney and pilot who reviewed public flight-tracking data, put visibility at under three-quarters of a mile. Two of the dead worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers out of Anchorage — fire protection engineer Sabrina Hansen, 45, and mechanical engineer Hayden Scalis, 25 — and were traveling with contractors and an Air Force officer to inspect and perform maintenance on a new fire suppression system. Hansen’s son, Kaleb, spoke about his mother on September 3. “I’m currently overwhelmed. It’s just, it’s a lot,” he said. Asked how he would describe her to people who never met her, he answered: “Amazing faith in God.” All eight aboard have now been identified by their employers, though troopers had not positively identified the remains as of last week. The operator, Security Aviation, named the two pilots on September 4: Capt. Dave Furber, 73, of Anchorage, and First Officer Sergei Zelenkov II, 34, of Chugiak. The two crashes were separate incidents, but together they have renewed attention on the risks of small-aircraft travel across a state where flying is often the only practical way to get from one town to the next.
For now, the final minutes of the flight out of Merrill Field belong to federal investigators, and they have published nothing. As of Friday, September 11, the safety board had announced no determination of cause, issued no preliminary report on Seldovia and released no accident docket. Johnson had said on August 27 that a preliminary report could be expected within two weeks; that window has passed. The office is not obviously behind schedule by its own recent standards — its preliminary report on a July 27 crash near McCarthy took 29 days, which would put Seldovia in late September — and the agency has said the Cape Newenham report is also still to come. No autopsy findings have been released for Middlebrook, the Schmidts or Simons. Whatever is formally concluded will come from the NTSB, not from the accounts that surfaced in the days after the aircraft was pulled from the water.
