A beloved former mayor has been named among the four people who died in a small plane crash close to Alaska earlier this week.  

Eric Middlebrook, 68, died when the Piper PA-24 went down in the Seldovia Slough, located 136 miles southwest of Anchorage, on Wednesday afternoon. 

Middlebrook was a seasoned pilot who served as the mayor of Bethel, a western Alaska town home to about 6,000 people, from 2006 until 2011. 

Three California residents – Daniel Simons, 82, of Los Gatos, Ronald Schmidt, 65, and 20-year-old Lance Schmidt, both of San Jose – also died in the crash, according to the Alaska Department of Public Safety. 

Public records indicate that all four victims were related.

They had been traveling from Merrill Field Airport in Anchorage to the tiny town of Seldovia when the aircraft crashed at about 1.15pm, Alaskan officials said. 

National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Alaska region chief Clint Johnson said the single-engine Piper was left submerged in about 15 feet of water. 

First responders struggled to reach the plane due in the semi-frozen slough, which can reach temperatures as low as 38 degrees Fahrenheit, Clint said. 

Alaska State Troopers were able to recover four bodies from inside the plane after the tide level dropped at about 6.30pm. The NTSB is investigating the cause of the crash, while the state medical examiner conducts autopsies on each of the victims. 

Beloved former mayor Eric Middlebrook, 68, died when the Piper PA-24 went down in the Seldovia Slough, located 136 miles southwest of Anchorage, on Wednesday afternoon

Middlebrook was a seasoned pilot who was remembered for his ‘quiet and gentle’ demeanor

Middlebrook, who was the pilot of the plane, was remembered as a ‘beloved’ member of the local community in both Anchorage and Bethel. Friends paid tribute to his ‘quiet and gentle’ demeanor on social media, while saying he left behind his wife, Molly. 

Mark Springer, a member of the Bethel City Council, said Middlebrook had a commercial refrigerator business and he frequently flew around Alaska to service customers. 

‘He was a real hardworking guy doing actually an important job as essentially the only refrigeration technician doing commercial work,’ Springer told NBC and CBS affiliate KTUU-TV. 

‘You’d always see him working on the coolers and the freezers at the stores here in Bethel, and he would fly his airplane to any village that called up and needed service on their equipment in the village stores.’

Springer said Middlebrook was a longtime Bethel resident who had moved to Anchorage over the last couple of years, but he frequently visited his hometown. 

‘He was a fixture in the community and he was a respected guy. He was known all over the [Yukon–Kuskokwim] Delta. It’s a tragic loss,’ Springer added. 

‘He was a pretty cool guy. He was well-known here in Bethel and well-liked.’

Four people were killed when a Piper PA-24-260 (like the one pictured) crashed in the waters in Alaska on Wednesday

The Piper PA-24-260 crashed at 1.15pm just moments after taking off from the airport in the small coastal town of Seldovia, about 136 miles southwest of Anchorage

Middlebrook graduated from Marysville High School in Northern California, according to a profile by the Appeal Democrat when he was elected as Bethel Mayor in 2006. 

The local newspaper spoke with Ronald Schmidt, another victim of the plane crash, who it reported was Middlebrook’s brother.

Schmidt, who was a local marketing representative at Cisco Systems in San Jose, California at the time, described his brother as ‘very talented and very smart’.

US Senator Dan Sullivan, of Alaska, said on Thursday that he was ‘praying for the families and love ones of those who were killed’ in the plane crash.

‘These tragedies are heartbreaking and unacceptable, which is why aviation safety and infrastructure in Alaska continue to be a top focus of mine,’ Sullivan said.  

‘I’ll get a briefing from the NTSB and the FAA as we work to get to the bottom of this tragedy.’

The Piper-PA plane involved in the crash is a single-engine low-wing plane with the capacity for one pilot and up to five passengers.  

The crash came less than a week after another plane went down at a remote military site in western Alaska, killing all eight people on board. 

Authorities said the plane had been making a second attempt to land on the runway in heavy fog, and the pilots could not see the airstrip.