A former mayor of Bethel was among the four men killed when a small plane crashed into shallow tidal water beside the remote coastal town of Seldovia, Alaska, on August 26, 2026. Alaska State Troopers, who have now identified the dead, said the single-engine Piper PA-24 went into the Seldovia Slough and that they were notified at about 1:18 p.m. local time.
Eric Middlebrook, 68, of Anchorage, was flying the plane. 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. All four died.
Seldovia, the destination logged for the Piper PA-24-260 after it lifted off from Merrill Field Airport in Anchorage, is a small community that sits roughly 135 miles to the southwest, on the far side of Kachemak Bay. The flight never reached it. The plane came to rest some 15 feet underwater a short distance off the shoreline, its outline showing through the surface of the slough.
The Tide Held Up the Recovery
Where the plane landed made the response agonizingly slow. Crews had no way to reach it while the water was high. Once the tide pulled back, troopers got to the fuselage and brought out all four bodies, which went to the state medical examiner’s office for autopsy.
Video shot at the scene showed the submerged plane sitting in the slough. Footage taken the following day captured a helicopter hoisting the wreckage out of the water. People nearby said they heard the plane take off and then heard it crash. One said onlookers were left terrified as they waited to learn whether anyone aboard had survived.
No road connects Seldovia to the rest of Alaska. Boats and aircraft are the only way in and out. Residents therefore depend on the town’s small airport and on the pilots who fly there for far more than convenience — the link is a lifeline.
A Veteran Pilot and Former Mayor
Alaska aviation and Alaska civic life both knew Middlebrook well. Bethel, the hub community of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in southwest Alaska, elected him mayor, and he spent years hauling refrigeration equipment by air out to villages scattered across the delta — the sort of unglamorous freight work that keeps food cold and supply chains running where there are no roads in or out.
Decades in Alaska had earned him a reputation as an experienced pilot. Northern California was where Middlebrook came from originally — the same region his three passengers called home.
In the Bay Area, where the Schmidts and Simons lived, the loss has been felt sharply. A San Jose address was shared by Ronald Schmidt and Lance Schmidt. At 82, Simons was the oldest of the four aboard. The names came from Alaska State Troopers, who released them after next of kin were notified.
Where the Investigation Stands
What brought the plane down is now the subject of an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Investigators, in their Early findings, have raised the possibility of an aborted landing or climb-out, with the aircraft clipping trees before it went into the water. Those details remain preliminary and could change, and NTSB investigations routinely take months to produce a factual report and longer still to reach a probable cause.
Before drawing conclusions, investigators typically go over the airframe and engine, the weather conditions at the time, the pilot’s flight history and any radar or witness data available. That work will center on the wreckage recovered from the slough.
“Horrendous” was how Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan described the crash. He said his thoughts were with the families, adding that the state has “got to keep making the investments” in aviation safety. No other part of 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 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. The two crashes were unrelated, yet taken together they have renewed attention on the risks that come with small-aircraft travel in a state where a flight is often the only practical way to get from one town to the next.
Federal investigators, for now, hold the questions about the final minutes of the flight from 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, not from the preliminary details that surfaced in the days after the aircraft was pulled from the water.