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. local time.
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.
The aircraft, a Piper PA-24-260, 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 — some 15 feet down — just off the shoreline, where its outline stayed 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 and Alaska civic life both knew Middlebrook well. Bethel, the hub community of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the state’s southwest, once elected him mayor, and for years he flew refrigeration equipment out to villages scattered across the delta — unglamorous cargo work of the sort that keeps food cold and supply chains intact where there are no roads in or out.
Decades of life in Alaska stood behind him, and fellow fliers regarded him as an experienced pilot. Middlebrook came originally from Northern California, the same region his three passengers called home.
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. Next of kin were notified before Alaska State Troopers released the names.
What Investigators Know So Far
What brought the plane down is now the subject of an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). 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 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 draw conclusions. The wreckage lifted out of 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. Nowhere else in the country leans on small aircraft the way Alaska does. Hundreds of communities there can be reached only by air for much of the year, 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. The two were separate incidents, but taken together they have renewed attention on the risks of small-aircraft travel across a state where a flight is often the only practical way to reach the next town. For the moment, federal investigators 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 the bodies of Middlebrook, the Schmidts, and Simons have been sent for autopsy as the inquiry got underway. Any formal findings will come from the NTSB rather than from the preliminary details that surfaced in the days after the aircraft was pulled from the water.