Arizona pair survive crash in Bering Sea
By Gail Tabor
Photo by John Samora
The Arizona Republic
An Ahwatukee couple on a humanitarian mission to Siberia survived a plane crash last week into the icy Bering Sea, managing to stay alive in the frigid waters for almost an hour while clinging to empty gas cans to stay afloat.
"It's amazing what you can do when you have to," Dave Anderson said Monday, as he described the ordeal.
They flew in a chartered plane from Anchorage, Alaska, to Siberia on Aug. 9, delivered their goods and started back on Friday, Aug. 13.
Had they been superstitious folk and had they not been scheduled to perform in a northern Alaska village that evening, perhaps the Andersons might have waited until Saturday to return. As it was, the twin-engine Piper 31 with seven people aboard took off for Alaska.
But 24 miles from Nome, Dave Anderson recalled, the right engine quit."The pilot dropped from 7,000 feet to about 3,500 feet and kept flying," he said. "Then the other engine quit. There was nothing but water beneath us."
Worst enemy: Hypothermia
Anderson didn't know exactly how long they could last in the water, but he was aware that if they survived the crash, their worst enemy was hypothermia.
"I was told later that nobody could stay alive in that water longer than 20 minutes," he said.
Dr. John Raife, an emergency room physician at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix, said that as the body loses heat, it also loses the ability to function, swim, and hold the head out of the water. The biggest risk, he said, is that the swimmer becomes so cold, he no longer can hold on and just gives up.
"We didn't have much luggage, but we were bringing 20 empty 5-gallon aviation gas cans to Alaska to be filled up and taken back to Siberia so the mission planes would be assured of clean fuel," Anderson continued.
During the time before the crash, Anderson said, everyone prayed out loud. At the moment of impact, one of the men popped out the emergency door. Grabbing empty gas cans, everyone jumped into the water.
"The plane sank within a minute," he said.
By chance, said Joette Storm, spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration in Anchorage, a Bering Air plane was passing overhead. The pilot saw a splash and thought it was a whale. A closer look proved it wasn't, so the pilot relayed data on the downed plane to Nome.
Anderson said that they saw the fixed-wing plane but that "it seemed like forever" until help arrived.
Heroic rescue
"About 30 minutes after we went down, the first helicopter appeared," he said. "Then a second one showed up. But they were small survey helicopters, not search-and-rescue. Getting people out of the water and in the helicopters was very trying."
Without rescue equipment, the helicopter pilots had to hover right over the water while a crewman stood on the skids to pull the floundering swimmers out of the water by hand, The downed plane's pilot was floating on his back, unconscious, Anderson said. Somehow, the rescuer on the skids got a rope around the pilot so he could be pulled up into a helicopter.
As people were rescued, one or two at a time, helicopters took them to Sledge Island, about two miles south west of the crash site. Then they flew back out to get the others.
The crews were heroic, Anderson said, telling how a rescuer at first couldn't reach Barbara Anderson then grabbed her by one hand. The pilot took off toward the island as she dangled in the air. Just before reaching the beach, she couldn't hold on any longer and dropped into the water. The crew member jumped in and dragged her to shore.
Finally, all seven people were out and taken to Nome for medical care.
"My wife's temperature in the emergency room was 90 degrees, Anderson said. "She was in the water about an hour."
'They were lucky'
Raife said, "That (body) temperature is on the verge of bad. Below 90 you start to get in real trouble. They were lucky."
Anderson admits they were all at the end of their strength and doubt anyone could have made it much longer. He realized how fortunate they were to survive when one of the helicopter pilots told him, "We were out to get dead bodies."
Crediting the hand of God with saving them, Anderson said his chilling experience hasn't dampen his wish to go back to those small communities in Siberia and provide badly needed help. His wife, he conceded, may be reluctant.
"I'm not afraid to fly again," he said. "I would check out a few things before I got on another small plane. But I will. One day, I will."
And ironically, those empty gas cans that kept the passengers afloat also were symbolic of their fate.
The FAA's Storm said the reason for the crash was that "the pilot ran out of fuel.”
