Alta Journal is pleased to present the fifth installment of a six-part series by writer Benjamin Cassidy. Each week, we’ll publish online the next portion of “The Ripples of Mutiny Bay.” Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading, and sign up here to be notified by email when each new installment is available.
The seaplane is an icon of the Pacific Northwest. Small aircraft launch and land regularly on the placid waters that lap against its major cities and destination isles, serving as quaint reminders of both the region’s rich aviation history and its majestic, fragmented geography. But on Labor Day weekend in 2022, in the most tranquil of settings, one such aircraft ferried its passengers to the most tragic of ends. Shortly after takeoff from idyllic San Juan Island, a de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter bound for the Seattle area nose-dived into Puget Sound, killing all 10 people and an unborn baby on board.
The flight carried a remarkably eclectic group of passengers, among them a seasoned civil rights activist, a popular winemaker, and a young lawyer. Their deaths sent shock waves up and down the entire West Coast, from Southern California to the northwest corner of Washington State, and as far as Minnesota. Who were these people, and what can we learn from their lives—and their deaths? In Part Four, Cassidy told the stories of Jason Winters, Joanne Mera, and Luke and Rebecca Ludwig.
Mark Canlis gazed out across the slate sea near his home on Whidbey Island. The co-owner of Seattle’s renowned Canlis restaurant was spending Labor Day weekend 2022 on the quiet tendril of land south of the San Juans with friends and family. They were watching a bird that Sunday afternoon when something else in flight entered their line of vision. A small aircraft was spiraling, nose down, toward the water.
Within seconds, the plane had crashed into Mutiny Bay, its impact a geyser on a placid cove. A delayed boom was heard for miles.
Canlis immediately headed for the water. With a neighbor, he pushed a fishing boat out, his son jumped in, and they motored to their boat, taking it nearly two nautical miles to where fuel was bubbling up.
Benjamin Cassidy discusses the accident with Alta Live on Wednesday, February 5 at 12:30 p.m. Pacific time.
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They circled the site with a small fleet of civilian boats. One of the impromptu rescuers found a body. Others hauled in shoes, unopened life jackets, and parts of seat cushions. On the phone with 911, Canlis, who was a captain in the U.S. Air Force before he helped helm his family’s restaurant business, told the operator that there was no smoke or visible plane wreckage.
After the Coast Guard arrived, Canlis and his son headed back to shore. The restaurateur would later learn that his longtime friend Ross Mickel, the one he’d shared birthdays with since elementary school in Bellevue, had been on the plane with his family.
Some victims’ family members didn’t hear about their loved ones’ crash for hours. Rick Williams, the brother of civil rights activist Sandy Williams, was staying with their mother, Wilhelmenia, on the other side of Washington. Though Williams had called them before she’d boarded the seaplane, they hadn’t received the usual text from her when she landed. Still, they figured she’d just forgotten. They left the blinds cracked that night, prepared to see headlights when she came in. But when Rick finally spoke with a representative from Alaska Airlines, he learned that Williams and her partner, Pat Hicks, hadn’t made their connecting flight.
Even when news spread, the floatplane’s roundabout route provided a false sense of security to some of those closest to Gabby Hanna, the young lawyer from Seattle. As he was boarding the ferry home from his wedding, Gavin Keene heard from a law school friend about the crash. But reports said that the aircraft had left from Friday Harbor; Keene had watched Hanna approach a seaplane in Roche Harbor. She must have been on a different flight, he concluded hopefully. A friend later informed him otherwise.
On Monday, September 5, the day after the crash, the Coast Guard suspended its search and rescue mission. The victims’ identities had already started to trickle out via family statements, but the agency confirmed all the names of those presumed dead that Tuesday.
There was the rising winemaker Mickel, his son, Remy, and his wife, Lauren Hilty, who was carrying their unborn son, Luca.
There was Williams and her partner, Hicks.
There were Luke and Rebecca Ludwig, the couple from Minnesota.
There was Joanne Mera, the San Diego events luminary.
There was pilot Jason Winters.
And there was Hanna, whose body was recovered in Mutiny Bay shortly after the crash, a coroner confirmed a few days later.
The bodies of six other passengers were also eventually discovered. Hilty, Remy Mickel, and Mera were not found, even after Hilty’s sisters, Kristen and Megan, raised more than $72,000 for a private search to supplement the initial one led by government authorities. The plane had sunk to nearly 200 feet below the surface of the water, and remotely operated vehicles had to battle strong currents deep in the sea.
For weeks, families agonized over recovering their loved ones and figuring out what had happened aboard the de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter, which had been manufactured in 1967 but inspected just three days earlier. By the end of September, U.S. Navy and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigators had salvaged the majority of the plane, lifting it onto a barge and transporting it to a facility on land.
The public, too, was following the situation closely, and not just in Washington State. News coverage spanned from People, which noted one of the victims’ ties to actor Megan Hilty, to the New York Times. With widespread reports came speculation on the internet; the plane’s near-perpendicular descent into the water raised questions about the mental health of the pilot, compounding the grief of those closest to Winters.
“We knew there was no way it was some of the crazy stuff some people were posting,” says Ryan Miller, a longtime friend of the pilot. “We knew it had to be something catastrophic and mechanical.”
A measure of vindication arrived in late October. Though the NTSB was still a year away from releasing its final accident report, the agency issued an urgent safety recommendation that offered a significant clue about what had caused the crash.
While examining the wreckage, investigators had noticed that the clamp nut of the horizontal stabilizer trim actuator, a component of the system that the pilot uses to control the airplane’s tail and pitch, had unscrewed from the barrel. The lock ring that was supposed to keep them together was missing entirely. With the control severed, the pilot would’ve been helpless to stop the plane’s fall. The NTSB called for an immediate inspection of lock rings on all DHC-3 planes.
The revelation didn’t surprise Alan Buchanan, the pilot who’d disembarked as a passenger just before the plane’s fateful final route. He’d suspected it might be a faulty actuator, which was nonetheless a rare failing; the NTSB could find only two other similar accidents. “When that happens, the pilot has no control of the airplane,” Buchanan says. “It just goes straight down.” Representatives for each of the passengers and the pilot filed lawsuits against the plane’s manufacturer, certificate holder, and operators, seeking damages for injuries and wrongful deaths.
Just over a year after the crash, the NTSB released its final report. It determined that the accident’s probable cause was indeed the in-flight separation of the actuator, which rendered the airplane’s pitch “uncontrollable.” The report also called for clearer maintenance procedures, pointing out a maddening technicality: Since 1996, regulations had required new aircraft to have a secondary locking mechanism if the failure of the first would jeopardize safety. But this mandate didn’t apply to retrofitting old planes like the one Winters was flying, which had been designed and manufactured decades earlier.
“The Mutiny Bay accident is an incredibly painful reminder that a single point of failure can lead to catastrophe in our skies,” NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said in a statement at the time.
Even as the report filled a gap in their knowledge of what had happened, friends and family members of the victims were still reckoning with the loss of their loved ones. Though their paths both diverged and overlapped in unexpected ways, they became grimly united as they sought financial relief for a mechanical failure that had robbed them of parents and children, siblings and friends, colleagues and civic leaders. More than two years later, this small measure of justice remains elusive, and the ripple effects of their losses all the more apparent.•
Visit altaonline.com/serials to keep reading “The Ripples of Mutiny Bay” by Benjamin Cassidy, and sign up for email notifications when each new installment is available.
Benjamin Cassidy is a journalist and fiction writer. Formerly the features editor of Seattle Met, he has written for GQ, National Geographic, and Scientific American, among other publications, and has received awards from the National City and Regional Magazine Association and Society of Professional Journalists. After spending several years in the Pacific Northwest, he now lives in New England.
