A series of miracles aligned at the right place and the right time, allowing a father and his two daughters to be rescued from the site of a plane crash on an icy lake in Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Early on March 24, 2025, John Morris wrote a Facebook post asking people to search for his son and granddaughters. They had not returned from a Sunday afternoon flight.
Terry Godes, a pilot, saw the post about the missing plane that had no locator beacon. The next morning, Godes and nearly a dozen other pilots searched for the missing plane. Godes flew out near a glacier on Tustumena Lake, where he saw the remnants of the crash.
A volunteer pilot first saw the wreckage.
“It kind of broke my heart to see that, but as I got closer down and lower, I could see that there’s three people on top of the wing,” he told the Associated Press. Godes said a prayer before he flew in closer toward the wreckage. That’s when he noticed something unbelievable. “They were alive and responsive and moving around,” Godes said the three waved people at him.
The pilot found the family in the first hour of the search.
The father — a fellow pilot — and his daughters, had survived 12 hours on the lake after their sightseeing trip from Soldotna to Skilak Lake ended in a crash, KTUU reports. The Alaska Army National Guard rescued the three people at 10:30 a.m. on March 24, after Godes alerted them of their location. Dale Eicher, another pilot, provided the plane’s coordinates.
“I wasn’t sure if we would find them, especially because there was a cloud layer over quite a bit of the mountains, so they could have very easily been in those clouds that we couldn’t get to,” Eicher said. But finding the family alive within an hour of starting the search ‘was very good news.'”
The father suffered from hypothermia.
After the rescue, the pilot and his daughters were taken to the hospital. Alaska State Troopers confirmed that the two girls are elementary and middle school age. “They spent a long, cold, dark, wet night out on top of a wing of an airplane that they weren’t planning on,” Godes said.
The girls were reportedly dry, but their father had been in the water at some point. He was hypothermic, although the extent of it is not clear. While the family were dressed to withstand temperatures on planes without good heating systems, they were not prepared to be outside, on the water when temperatures dropped down to the 20s.
Authorities don’t know what caused the crash.
Commander of the National Guard’s 207th Aviation Regiment, Lt. Col. Brendon Holbrook, spoke about the luck of the plane not sinking in the water. “It was literally the best possible scenario and outcome,” Holbrook said. “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.”
There’s still no indication of what caused the plane crash. Morris, whose Facebook post led to the rescue of his family, thanked the Kenai community for its help and said he has “air in his lungs again,” KTTU reports.
