The former mayor of a small town in Alaska, who was an experienced pilot, was among those killed when the small plane he was piloting crashed in shallow waters near a remote Alaskan town.
Alaska Department of Public Safety on Thursday identified the pilot as Eric Middlebrook, 68, of Anchorage. It identified the passengers as Ronald Schmidt, 65, Lance Schmidt, 20, and Daniel Simons, 82, and said in its statement that all three were from California.
The Piper PA-24 was bound Wednesday for the airport in the small town of Seldovia after taking off from Anchorage when it crashed. Seldovia’s airport is about 135 miles (220 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage.
Middlebrook, who had a commercial refrigerator business, served on the city council and was mayor of Bethel, a town of 6,000 people in western Alaska that sits on the banks of the Kuskokwim River, said Mark Springer, a member of the Bethel City Council, who knew him.
Springer said Middlebrook had moved to Anchorage in the last couple of years after living in Bethel since the 1980s, but he continued to visit the town.
He said Middlebrook had been flying his plane for decades to the villages that dot the Kuskokwim River Delta to fix coolers and refrigerators.
“He was a fixture in the community and he was a respected guy. He was known all over the YK (Yukon–Kuskokwim) Delta. It’s a tragic loss,” Springer said.
Middlebrook, who graduated from Marysville High School in Northern California, became mayor of Bethel in 2006, according to a local newspaper profile of him when he was elected to the office by the city council.
The Appeal Democrat quoted his brother, Ron Schmidt, who at the time was a marketing representative at Cisco Systems Inc. in San Jose, California, as saying Middlebrook was one of his six siblings.
“He’s very talented and very smart, but no one ever guessed politics as his forte,” Schmidt said then.
Family members of Middlebrook, Schmidt and Simons didn’t immediately return messages Thursday from The Associated Press seeking comment.
After the crash, the plane came to rest in about 15 feet (4.6 meters) of water in the Seldovia Slough near the shore, said Clint Johnson, the Alaska region chief of the National Transportation Safety Board. Troopers had to wait for the tide to go out before they could reach the plane and remove the victims.
It was not immediately clear what caused the crash.
The NTSB is investigating.
U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan, of Alaska, said he was awaiting a briefing from the NTSB and Federal Aviation Administration as they work to determine what went wrong.
“These tragedies are heartbreaking and unacceptable, which is why aviation safety and infrastructure in Alaska continue to be a top focus of mine,” he said in a social media post.
Less than a week earlier, another plane crashed at a remote military site in western Alaska, killing all eight people aboard. The aircraft had been making its second approach to the runway in heavy fog and its pilots could not see the gravel airstrip, authorities said.
