A veteran Alaska aviator who once led the city of Bethel as its mayor was one of four men killed when a small plane dropped into shallow tidal water at the edge of the remote coastal town of Seldovia, Alaska, and all four have now been identified by Alaska State Troopers. The single-engine Piper PA-24 went into the Seldovia Slough on August 26, 2026, and troopers were notified at about 1:18 p.m. local time.
At the controls was Eric Middlebrook, 68, of Anchorage. His three passengers all came 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 Piper PA-24-260 had taken off from Merrill Field Airport in Anchorage on a run to Seldovia, a small community roughly 135 miles to the southwest, on the far side of Kachemak Bay. It never got there. The plane came to rest some 15 feet underwater a short distance off the shoreline, 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 removed all four bodies, and the remains were sent to the state medical examiner’s office for autopsy.
Video shot at the scene showed the submerged aircraft in the slough, and footage from the following day captured a helicopter lifting the wreckage clear of the water. People nearby said they heard the plane take off and then heard it crash. One described onlookers as terrified in the minutes afterward, waiting to find out whether anyone aboard had lived.
No road reaches Seldovia. Residents and visitors arrive by boat or by air, which makes the town’s small airport — and the pilots who fly into it — a lifeline rather than a convenience.
A Longtime Pilot and Former Mayor
Alaska aviation knew Middlebrook, and so did Alaska civic life. He served as mayor of Bethel, the hub community of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the state’s southwest, and for years he flew refrigeration equipment out to villages scattered across the delta — unglamorous cargo 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 was originally from Northern California, the same region his three passengers called home.
In the Bay Area, where the Schmidts and Simons lived, the loss has been felt keenly. Ronald Schmidt and Lance Schmidt shared a San Jose address. Simons, at 82, was the oldest man aboard. Alaska State Troopers released the names after next of kin were notified.
What Investigators Know So Far
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is working to determine what brought the plane down. Early findings point to a possible aborted landing or climb-out, with the aircraft clipping trees before it went into the water. Those details remain preliminary and could change; NTSB investigations routinely take months to produce a factual report, and longer to reach a probable cause.
Investigators generally work through the airframe and engine, the weather at the time, the pilot’s flight history and any radar or witness data available before they draw conclusions. The wreckage pulled from the slough will sit at the center of that effort.
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, with hundreds of communities reachable only by air for much of the year — a dependence that has kept air safety near 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 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 worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers out of the Anchorage office — fire protection engineer Sabrina Hansen, 45, and mechanical engineer Hayden Scalis — and were traveling with contractors and Air Force personnel to inspect a newly installed fire suppression system. Sabrina Hansen’s son, Kaleb Hansen, spoke about her 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 his mother to people who never met her, he said: “Amazing faith in God.” 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. The safety board has announced no determination of cause, and autopsies on Middlebrook, the Schmidts and Simons were ordered as the inquiry got underway. Whatever is formally concluded will come from the NTSB, not from the preliminary details that surfaced in the days after the aircraft was pulled from the water.