Survivors of Alaska crash share stories

JUNEAU, Alaska — Ginny Hacker Eiseman spent the weekend reeling in a bounty of colorful fish at Steamboat Bay Fishing Club on remote Noyes Island in Alaska. She was returning home to Ketchikan when the unthinkable happened.

The chartered Taquan Air flight that she and 10 others were on crashed Tuesday on a rocky mountainside near Ketchikan. Everyone survived and was rescued hours later by the U.S. Coast Guard.

“For those wondering I’m alive,” Eiseman, a holistic health coach, posted on Facebook after the rescue, noting that another woman with her was alive, too.

The pilot told an investigator that he had left a lodge on Noyes Island just before 7:50 a.m., with the passengers and light cargo bound for Ketchikan, said Clint Johnson of the National Transportation Safety Board in Alaska.

During the flight, the pilot said, he noticed rising terrain ahead and tried to gain altitude to avoid it. But the float-equipped de Havilland Otter aircraft collided with it instead. The crash occurred around 8:35 a.m., Johnson said.

Alaska State Troopers identified the pilot as Mike Hudgins of Ketchikan. Hudgins made the news in 2016 for rescuing a dog swimming in a busy channel.

The downed aircraft had an emergency locator that aided a search complicated by limited visibility of roughly one-quarter mile, Coast Guard Petty Officer Charly Hengen said.

The crash occurred on Prince of Wales Island, according to the Coast Guard. The heavily forested island near the southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle is the fourth-largest island in the U.S. At 2,577 square miles, it’s larger than Delaware.