Private pilot Michael Mackowiak, 56, was so sure his Cessna's fuel tanks were nearly full when he left Juneau for the short hop to Haines Nov. 4 that when his gauges suddenly pointed to zero in midair, he thought they were broken.
Mackowiak checked the circuit breakers to make sure there was still power to the gauges, but the breakers were fine, according to a U.S. National Transportation Safety Board report released Tuesday. His engine was still running normally, he told the NTSB, and instead of looking for an emergency place to land, Mackowiak took his plane, with its three passengers, up to 2,500 feet. He tapped the gauges and one jumped to a quarter-tank.
Then the engine died.
The NTSB report, a preliminary look into the eventual crash, said Mackowiak used the primer control to try to squirt some fuel directly into the engine. The engine responded for a moment but never reached full power again.
One of Mackowiak's passengers — the NTSB report identified her only as a female — told a crash investigator the pilot looked for an emergency spot to land, but the beaches in the area were all rocky, not sandy. So he opted for a water landing as close as he could get to the shore, she said.
"During touchdown on the water, the airplane's main landing gear wheels skipped several times across the water before the airplane nosed over, coming to rest inverted," the NTSB said. Even upside-down, the four occupants — the pilot and his wife, and two teens, a boy and girl — were able to scramble out of the Cessna cabin and out onto a wing.
But that spot wasn't safe for long, the report said. The plane started to sink. The four jumped into the water and swam 10 to 15 minutes to reach the beach, where they shivered and waited for rescue.
Help took about an hour to arrive, according to the report. Another pilot had picked up Mackowiak's mayday report and forwarded it to the Federal Aviation Administration in Juneau, which alerted the U.S. Coast Guard and other aircraft. The four were spotted on the east side of Lynn Canal, about 23 miles from Haines, by a Temsco helicopter and the Coast Guard, the NTSB said.
The pilot and two of the passengers had minor injuries. Martha Mackowiak, 51, was more seriously injured and was flown to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. Her pastor, the Rev. Ron Horn, told KHNS radio that she suffered cardiac arrest and underwent surgery. Her condition eventually improved from critical to serious, but Horn said she was still at risk.
Horn said Mike Mackowiak credited the two teens — his son Nik and Victoria Hansen — with helping him and his wife make it to shore in the rough, cold water.
The NTSB said the aircraft was a single-engine Cessna 180 equipped with wheels for landing gear. It said the pilot made a visual walk-around check at Juneau before boarding, and saw his initial fuel load registered between three-fourths and seven-eighths full when he started the engine, far more than he needed for the 50-minute flight to Haines. He took off from Juneau at 1:13 p.m.
The plane crashed in water depth of about 600 to 780 feet, the NTSB said.
Attempts to recover the aircraft remain ongoing according to NTSB spokesman Clint Johnson. Johnson said the agency has been working with the insurer of the aircraft to do a sonar search in an effort to find the plane. So far, that has been unsuccessful.
"We can't really do anything as far as looking at the airplane, from a mechanical standpoint, until we find the darn thing," Johnson said.