Alaska State Troopers have now identified all four men who died after a small plane came down in shallow tidal water next to the remote coastal town of Seldovia, Alaska; among them was a veteran Alaska aviator who once served as mayor of Bethel. The single-engine Piper PA-24 crashed into the Seldovia Slough on August 26, 2026, with troopers notified at about 1:18 p.m. local time.
Flying the plane was Eric Middlebrook, 68, of Anchorage. His three passengers had all come 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.
The aircraft was a Piper PA-24-260. Merrill Field Airport in Anchorage was its departure point, and its destination was Seldovia, a small community roughly 135 miles to the southwest on the far side of Kachemak Bay. It never landed. The plane came to rest underwater — some 15 feet down — a short distance from shore, and its outline could be seen beneath the surface of the slough.
A Recovery Delayed by the Tide
Where the plane landed made the response agonizingly slow. Until the water dropped, crews simply had no way in. Troopers reached the fuselage after the tide pulled back and brought out all four bodies, which were sent to the state medical examiner’s office for autopsy.
The submerged plane, sitting in the slough, was captured on video from the scene, and a helicopter hoisting the wreckage out of the water appeared in footage taken the following day. People nearby said the plane took off within earshot and that they then heard it crash. One said the aftermath left onlookers terrified as they waited to learn whether anyone aboard had survived.
No road connects Seldovia to the rest of Alaska. Boats and aircraft are how residents and visitors get there, which turns the town’s small airport — and the pilots who serve it — into a lifeline rather than a convenience.
A Longtime Pilot and Former Mayor
Alaska aviation and Alaska civic life both knew Middlebrook well. Bethel, the hub community of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the state’s southwest, elected him mayor. Refrigeration equipment bound for villages spread across the delta filled his aircraft for years — cargo runs that draw little notice yet keep food cold and supply lines running in places no road reaches.
Decades of his life were spent in Alaska, and he was regarded as an experienced pilot. Middlebrook came originally from Northern California, the same region his three passengers called home.
Grief from the crash has reached south to the Bay Area, home to the Schmidts and Simons. A San Jose address was shared by Ronald Schmidt and Lance Schmidt. The oldest of the four aboard was Simons, at 82. The names were released by Alaska State Troopers once next of kin had been notified.
What Investigators Know So Far
What brought the plane down is now a question for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). A possible aborted landing or climb-out is what the early findings point to, with the aircraft clipping trees before it went into the water. Such details remain preliminary and could change, and a factual report routinely takes months in NTSB investigations, with a probable cause taking longer still.
Before drawing conclusions, investigators typically go through the airframe and engine, the weather at the time, the pilot’s flight history and whatever radar or witness data exists. The wreckage pulled from the slough will be central to that work.
Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan called the crash “horrendous” and said his thoughts were with the families, adding that the state has “got to keep making the investments” in aviation safety. No other state leans on small aircraft the way Alaska does. Air is the only way to reach hundreds of communities there for much of the year, and that dependence has held air safety close to the heart 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 steep, rising terrain near the Cape Newenham Long Range Radar Site during a second landing attempt in thick fog, according to the NTSB. Two of the dead were U.S. Army Corps of Engineers employees from the Anchorage office — fire protection engineer Sabrina Hansen, 45, and mechanical engineer Hayden Scalis — who were traveling with contractors and Air Force personnel to inspect a newly installed fire suppression system.
Hansen’s son, Kaleb Hansen, spoke about his mother on September 3. “I’m currently overwhelmed. It’s just, it’s a lot. Overwhelmed, stress, you know,” Kaleb said. Asked how he would describe her to people who never met her, he said: “Amazing faith in God.” Nothing links the two crashes, which were separate incidents. Taken together, though, they have drawn fresh attention to the dangers of small-aircraft travel in a state where a flight is frequently the only realistic route from one town to the next.
Federal investigators, for now, hold the questions about the final minutes of the flight out of Merrill Field. No determination of cause has been announced by the safety board, and as the inquiry got underway the bodies of Middlebrook, the Schmidts, and Simons were sent for autopsy. Any formal findings will come from the NTSB — not from the preliminary details that surfaced in the days after the aircraft was pulled from the water.
