Terry Godes, one of a dozen volunteer pilots who joined a search in Alaska for a missing pilot and two children after seeing a Facebook post asking for help, says it "kind of broke" his heart when he saw wreckage partially submerged in a lake. "But as I got closer down and lower, I could see that there's three people on top of the wing," he tells the AP. He says they were "alive and responsive" and waved at him as his plane approached. The Alaska Army National Guard says the man and two children were rescued Monday morning thanks to the sighting by the "good Samaritan aircraft," CBS News reports.
The man and the two children—one elementary school age, the other middle school age—were taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, troopers say. The Piper PA-12 Super Cruiser was reported overdue late Sunday. Godes says most of the plane was submerged in Tustumena Lake, around 80 miles southwest of Anchorage, with only the wing and part of the rudder above the ice and water. "They spent a long, cold, dark, wet night out on top of a wing of an airplane that they weren't planning on," he says.
John Morris said his son and two granddaughters were on the plane. After the rescue, he tells KTUU, he has "air in his lungs again." The cause of the crash is unclear, though officials say the Kenai Peninsula lake is "notorious for its sudden dangerous winds." Lt. Col. Brendon Holbrook, commander of the guard's 207th Aviation Regiment, tells the AP that the three were rescued by a helicopter that hovered by plane's wing. "It was literally the best possible scenario and outcome," Holbrook says. "Ultimately, the crew of that airplane were lucky because from what my guys told me, that plane was in the ice with the tail refrozen and if that tail hadn't refrozen, it would have sunk." (More Alaska stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
