Cook Inlet plane crash survivors live to tell harrowing tale

MAT-SU — As soon as the floatplane’s engine dropped from a roar to an idle 3,000 feet over Cook Inlet, everyone in the Cessna 185 knew something was very wrong.

Nobody said a word.

Nobody panicked.

The plane began dropping out of the sky.

Pilot Scott Johannes set to work looking for what had suddenly gone so wrong with the fuel system: valves, pumps, controls, breakers — the aviator’s checklist when the power cuts out.

“I immediately realized it was something serious. I looked — we were 20 miles off the coastline and four to five miles the other way. I just immediately turned the plane toward Kalgin Island,” said Johannes, a 48-year-old from Wasilla.

In fewer than five minutes, Johannes would have to bring the plane down in wind-chopped, six-foot seas and hope for the best.

Johannes, a vice president with Criterion General Inc., helped build the AT&T Sports Center on the Palmer-Wasilla Highway. His wife, Karis, 48, is a popular soccer coach there. She sat in the back of the plane the day of the crash, July 24.

The couple’s friends of more than 20 years, Doug and Jill Warner, came along, too. Doug Warner, 52, works at the Division of Agriculture offices in Palmer. Jill, 55, teaches social studies at Teeland Middle School. The group has traveled extensively together on hiking and hunting trips.

Earlier in the day, the group had headed out for some bear viewing at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park, but was turned back by bad weather in the passes. They were flying back to Kenai to fuel up in case the weather broke.

Near Kalgin Island — a 12-mile-long, boot-shaped piece of land due east of Mount Redoubt — the weather aloft was fine: a thin layer of clouds at 5,000 feet. But the seas below were another story: waves at four to six feet in unpredictable chop from all directions instead of regular rollers.

Johannes, interviewed by phone between meetings this week, said he looked down and knew that landing in that water was beyond his abilities as a pilot. He initially hoped to set the plane down in a relatively smooth trough between the waves, but soon realized that a trough one minute would fill sideways with a breaking wave the next.

“I’m looking at where I’m trying to land and it didn’t look like it was wide enough to get the wing tips between the waves,” he said.

At the last minute, Johannes said, he just nosed the plane down and picked up speed so he could “flare” the plane and turn into the wave simultaneously, making sure to keep the Cessna’s nose up so the plane didn’t flip when it hit the water.

When the plane smacked into the face of one wave, the impact snapped the struts that held the float to the passenger side of the plane.

The Cessna bounced and came down in the face of a second wave. That’s when the struts holding the pilot-side float snapped.

Inside, the plane’s occupants did a quick welfare check. Somehow, everyone was OK. (Later, they’d notice a few cuts and bruises.)

As the plane began filling with water, the people inside grabbed inflatable lifejackets and scrambled out. Johannes set off the SPOT personal locator beacon clipped to the plane in hopes of sending out a GPS signal to potential rescuers.

Everyone stayed calm.

“Thankfully, Scott had all that gear on board,” Doug Warner said. “We were just thankful everybody was fine.”

In hopes of adding buoyancy to the sinking aircraft, the two men grabbed a rope from the plane and lashed the floats back to the fuselage.

Even so, the choppy water made it hard to hang on, Warner said. Karis Johannes and Jill Warner stood on the plane’s tail, clinging to it for purchase. Steady six-foot seas sometimes gave way to bigger waves. Warner started warning the women when a big one was coming, Scott Johannes said, but they quickly asked him to stop. Whenever he did that, they would look over at the nasty water moving toward them and start to panic.

After about an hour, the group started to wonder if their emergency signal had been heard. The plane went down about four miles from the coast of Kalgin Island. A swim to land was impossible.

“I said, ‘You know, God, I think we can use a little more help here,’” Warner remembers saying. “Within (what) seems like five minutes, the satellite phone floated by.”

The phone, in an orange case, was part of a steady stream of debris exiting the plane as it filled with water.

Scott Johannes grabbed the phone, perched on the tail, tried to keep the waves from drenching the phone and called 911.

He couldn’t get through. So he tried information and realized he was talking with an operator in Canada who didn’t even know where Kenai was. An 800 number for a weather briefing that usually connects to the Kenai weather station this time sent Johannes to an Air Force base Outside.

The group realized they’d have to think of a local, direct number where someone could call for help.

“We all started hollering numbers of friends we could recall off the top of our heads,” Johannes said. “Five or six times in a row, I got a recording.”

He left one message, on his son’s answering machine. He would later realize the line was busy because his son was talking with authorities responding to the locator signal.

Then Doug Warner remembered the direct line to Palmer police, where his wife used to work. From there, the call went to the Palmer post of the Alaska State Troopers, then to the Soldotna post.

“They said they had a chopper that couldn’t rescue us but it could spot us,” Johannes said. “Once we knew somebody knew where we were it was a great relief. It’s a pretty empty feeling sitting out there in those waves not knowing if anyone knows where you’re at.”

Soon, the group heard a helicopter, but couldn’t see it. They phoned in a more specific location. Soldotna-based Alaska Wildlife Trooper Shane Stephenson came into view in his Robinson R44 helicopter. Stephenson, 51, had been conducting commercial fishing patrols and was parked on a beach at Clam Gulch when he heard about the plane crash.

Arriving on scene, Stephenson saw a Cessna 185 sinking into the rough seas of Cook Inlet with four people on the tail.

“I was amazed that the plane was still floating because the wings were just below the surface of the water,” Stephenson said this week.

The trooper opened the helicopter door and tossed out a four-man life raft. He’d attached a cord to the raft’s lanyard just in case he ever ran across a rescue situation and needed to deploy the raft fast. But he said he figured that would be for a boat, not a plane.

“I opened the door, unbuckled everything and held on to that little string for dear life,” he said.

The raft deployed at some point, either then or on the way down. Stephenson lowered it to the people on the plane.

They grabbed it for use just in case the plane sank.

Stephenson struggled to get close enough to the churning water to rescue anybody.

“I was afraid I was going to end up in the drink with them,” he said. “With the rotors turning, that would have been a bad scene.”

At one point, Scott Johannes hoisted Karis up toward the pontoon of the helicopter. She tried to get her arms around the slick pontoon but couldn’t get any purchase and fell back. That’s when Stephenson lifted up, circled and headed for the nearby island in search of the closest potential rescuers: the commercial fishermen he knew to occupy a few cabins on Kalgin’s shore.

He tried three cabins. Nobody there. At the fourth, Stephenson found a group of set net fishermen just back from a trip out. One had just fired up a sauna to ward off the chill. Without hesitation, the set netters got back into their 24-foot skiff and headed for the plane.

Stephenson returned to hover over the plane so the fishermen knew where it was.

“When we first saw the boat it looked like a tiny little fisherman,” Warner said. “It was bigger than it appeared. The waves were so big you think, ‘This is a tiny little boat. I’ll happily get on it,’ but they were coming through some very big waters to get us.”

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service aircraft circled above as the skiff brought them in, according to the troopers.

The group made it cold but safe to the island where the hot sauna waited.

“We didn’t notice any uncontrollable shaking, but I think we all realized our thinking was starting to slow down,” Warner said of the possibility that hypothermia had started to set in. “It flat-out felt good to be in that sauna and on ground again.”

A National Guard rescue helicopter ferried the four back to Wasilla.

They flew over the plane’s last location but didn’t see the Cessna.

Johannes said he has no plans to try to recover it. He does have another plane, an American Champion 8GCBC.

He’s already gone flying.

The National Transportation Safety Board opened a case on the crash but won’t likely mount an investigation because there’s no aircraft to analyze, said investigator Larry Lewis. He noted, however, that the Cessna 185 has “some issues” with going back to an idle, as the Johannes plane did.

“It’s just a throttle linkage issue,” Lewis said. “Without being [able] to look at it, we can’t say whether that was it or not. That would have been one of the first things we would have looked at.”

The problem is caused by wear, the investigator said. He encourages pilots to check for excessive wear during annual checks.

Johannes said that he did annual checks and looked for wear. He also said he couldn’t know exactly what the cause of the crash was because the plane was gone.

He’d get another 185, he said. “I absolutely loved that plane. Unfortunately, I think most people have been driving in a car when it quit. That doesn’t mean you aren’t going to drive again. It’s just in an airplane it’s a whole lot more dangerous.”

Warner said he’d fly with Johannes again in a second.

“That’s the reason we survived is because of his great abilities as a pilot and his quick thinking,” he said.

Both men praised Stephenson’s seat-of-the-pants decision to get help on the island, which probably shaved an hour off the rescue time, and the fishermen who crossed four miles of turbulent water to come to their rescue.

But, both said, the four really helped themselves by staying calm — a mind-set bolstered by their religious faith and long years spent adventuring together.

Trooper Stephenson offered another theory, especially after hearing about the satellite phone that floated by.

“The good Lord wasn’t done with them, that’s the only thing I could think,” he said.