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.
Eric Middlebrook, 68, of Anchorage, was at the controls. 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. Ronald Schmidt was Middlebrook’s brother, one of six siblings, according to a newspaper profile the AP cited. How the two Schmidts were related to each other has not been reported.
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 south shore of Kachemak Bay. It never got there. The plane came to rest near the shore of the slough under about 15 feet of water, by The Associated Press’s account; the head of the safety board’s Alaska office put it at 16 to 17 feet. Its outline stayed visible beneath the surface.
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, at about 6:30 p.m. that evening, troopers got to the fuselage and removed all four bodies. 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 won a seat on the Bethel City Council in 2006 and was chosen mayor by that council in 2008, serving again from October 2010 to October 2011 in the hub community of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. 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 and moved north in 1981 after visiting a friend — the same region his three passengers called home. “His job basically was to keep the ice cream frozen in the village stores,” former Bethel Mayor Mark Springer said. “He had his own airplane, and he would fly out to the villages to do refrigeration repair.”
In the Bay Area, where the Schmidts and Simons lived, the loss has been felt keenly. Simons, at 82, was the oldest man aboard. Alaska State Troopers released the names on Thursday, August 27, 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, and it has been careful to say it does not yet know. Clint Johnson, who runs the board’s Alaska office, said the day after the crash that “there may have been an attempted go-around” but added, in the same breath, “we’re not drawing any conclusions.” A day later he was blunter: “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; no trooper or safety board statement I could find says so. Federal Aviation Administration information for the airport does advise pilots of trees near both runway approaches.
A witness, Lindsay Burnett, described a takeoff rather than a landing: “We heard it happen. We heard the plane taking off and heard it crash.” 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. No preliminary report on the Seldovia crash had been released as of September 7.
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 written statement he called the run of crashes “heartbreaking and unacceptable.” 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 mountainous terrain west of the runway at the Cape Newenham Long Range Radar Site during a second landing attempt, in fog and mist with visibility under three-quarters of a mile, 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, whom one Alaska outlet put at 45 and another at 46, and mechanical engineer Hayden Scalis, 25 — and were traveling with contractors and an Air Force officer to inspect a newly installed fire suppression system. The operator, Security Aviation, named the two pilots on September 5: Capt. Dave Furber, 73, of Anchorage, and First Officer Sergei Zelenkov II, 34, of Chugiak. Troopers had not positively identified any of the remains as of that date, and the safety board said a preliminary report on that crash would come within weeks. 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. As of September 7, the safety board had announced no determination of cause and issued no preliminary report on Seldovia, 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 accounts that surfaced in the days after the aircraft was pulled from the water.