A pilot and his two kids survived for approximately 12 hours on the wing of a plane that had crashed and was partially submerged in the frozen waters of an Alaskan lake. Their rescue was made possible after a generous man noticed them and assisted in calling for help.

The single-engine plane was taking a tour over Soldotna to Skilak Lake on the Kenai Peninsula. It lost communication while in the air and couldn't be traced. Fearing for the disappearance of the plane, individuals started putting out alerts on social media, hoping to track the passengers.

One of the individuals who viewed the post was Terry Godes. He chose to assist and took it upon himself to go in search of the plane. In flight near Tustumena Lake, near a glacier, Terry spotted what appeared to be wreckage.

Initially, the sight of the plane wreckage saddened him, but then he noticed something amazing. “It kind of broke my heart to see that, but as I got closer down and lower, I could see that there are three people on top of the wing,” he told The Associated Press.

“They were alive and responsive and moving around,” he added, explaining that they even waved at him from the wing.

Terry called it a night of miracles. Although the plane crashed, it didn't sink, and the survivors were able to cling to the top of the wing throughout the icy night, even as temperatures fell into the 20s (below zero in Celsius).

Following his sighting of the survivors, Terry called for help on the radio. Another pilot, Dale Eicher, received the call and relayed the message to the Alaska State Troopers.

“I wasn’t sure if we would find them, especially because there was a cloud layer over quite a bit of the mountains, so they could have very easily been in those clouds that we couldn’t get to,” Dale Eicher explained.

Luckily enough, the three survivors were saved by the arrival of the Alaska Army National Guard. They took them to the hospital, where they were reported not to have sustained life-threatening injuries, as declared by Alaska State Troopers. 

Due to the swift action of Terry Godes and the assistance of others, a disaster was prevented, and the pilot and his children survived to tell their incredible survival story. 

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