‘Mike, I think we’re dead.’ Lakewood plane crash survivors were seconds from fiery end

Editor’s note: After the National Transportation Safety Board said in July it couldn’t find mechanical problems with a floatplane that crashed in Lakewood in 2023, the pilot contacted the News Tribune and offered to recount the story of the crash and his and his passenger’s escape from the burning wreckage. The interview took place Sept. 11 in Lakewood, Washington.

It was going to be tight, Mark Ceccarelli thought, but he would clear the trees coming closer and closer to his floatplane every passing second. With mechanic Mike Beckett seated behind him, Ceccarelli had just aborted a landing on Lake Steilacoom after an instrument alert indicated a potential problem.

It was a clear and calm May 9, 2023 and until then, perfect conditions for their test flight in the newly purchased plane.

“The last tree went out of the windscreen and at that point, I finally breathed a sigh of relief, and I thought, we’re going to make it,” Ceccarelli said.

Then came the deafening sound of his propeller chomping though branches.

The plane pitched down and the ground came into view.

“I said, ‘Mike, I think we’re dead, and I’m really sorry,” Ceccarelli recalled.

Beckett’s mind went blank, but he still responded.

“I said, ‘No, we’re not. We’re gonna be OK.”

The plane banked to the left and then the right as it stalled. Ceccarelli could see houses in the deeply wooded neighborhood south of the lake.

The veteran pilot used what little maneuverability he had to steer away from them.

Moments later, trees sheared off both wings as the plane fell to the ground, coming to rest in a home’s driveway. Fuel began pouring from ruptured tanks and streamed toward small but growing flames.

With a fireball about to finish off the wreckage, the severely wounded men began a desperate fight for survival.

Floatplane dream

Seconds before the crash, Ceccarelli flew over the lakeside home where he and wife Margie had raised their four children. It had once been her parents’ home.

Ceccarelli grew up in Tacoma’s North End but spent time in his grandparents’ Seattle garden, near Lake Union, where he watched with boyhood fascination as floatplanes landed and departed. By the time he was 18, he had his pilot’s license.

On his second date with Margie, he took her for a plane ride.

The planes he’s owned through the decades never included a floatplane because Margie, mindful of dollars, forbade the pricey purchase, Ceccarelli said.

In 2022, Margie was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the couple made the best of their remaining time together. Sometime before she lapsed into a coma, she gave her blessing to the floatplane.

Ceccarelli chokes up when he recalls the day she died in November 2022.

“I was just sitting there … and she woke up, opened her eyes, she looked at me, and she smiled, and then she left,” he said. “That’s when I told her, ‘You’re my guardian angel now.’”

Friends

Ceccarelli 67, and Beckett, 43, met at the Spanaway Airport in 2015 when both had planes there. Beckett, a Puyallup Tribal Police officer at the time, eventually left the force and became a plane mechanic.

In April 2023, Ceccarelli picked up the plane in Wisconsin and flew it back to Lake Steilacoom. Before he left, he applied a large image of Margie to the side of the plane with the words, “My Guardian Angel,” inscribed above it.

“In those three weeks since I had gotten it home, I flew that freaking thing almost every day,” he said. “I mean, it was such a joy to fly. It was an awesome machine.”

Ceccarelli took off the morning of the crash to pick Beckett up at the Flying B Ranch Airport in Yelm. Beckett and other residents there access their homes with vehicles from roads and with planes from a private airstrip. The plan was to fly back to Lake Steilacoom and then adjust the plane’s idle, which was running a little high, Beckett said.

On the way to the lake, Ceccarelli flew the plane along the Ruston Way waterfront in Tacoma before heading to American Lake where they landed, taxied a bit and then took off again for Lake Steilacoom.

“We made a glassy landing,” Ceccarelli said. “There wasn’t even a breath of wind.”

Lake Steilacoom

A kayaker on Lake Steilacoom forced Ceccarelli to take a different approach, which also took him over his house, built on a peninsula in the lake. There was still plenty of room to land and, he figured, take off again if needed.

The amphibious 2019 Aviat Husky plane had retractable wheels for landings on solid runways, like the strip near Beckett’s home. When landing on water, those wheels must be in the up position, otherwise they could flip the plane. The plane comes equipped with a laser guided alert system that is designed to detect a gear and terrain mismatch.

Seconds from landing, the laser system sounded, and Ceccarelli thought he had a gear mismatch.

“He’s like, ‘Well, I’m going to do a go-around.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, OK, that’s fine,” Beckett recalled. The trees in the distance looked far away.

“I shoved the throttle all the way open, pushed the prop forward for maximum grab, and started doing the most high performance climb of my life,” Ceccarelli said.

But the narrow lake soon become a box canyon of trees. There was no room to turn. He pointed the plane to the lowest point on the tree line.

Over the intercom system, Ceccarelli asked Beckett if he thought they could make it.

“I asked him, ‘Can you see better than me? Is there a better direction?’” Ceccarelli recalled.

“You’re doing everything there is,” Beckett told him. “We’re going to be fine.”

Then, according to Ceccarelli, a puff of a tailwind cost him a few feet of elevation.

Moments later Beckett watched as the left float dug into the crown of a cottonwood tree. The plane, already on the verge of stalling from its steep angle of ascent, lost its lift.

“At that point, I looked down and I saw the homes, and I realized we’re going to crash,” Ceccarelli said.

Screams

At that same moment, Ron and Liz Cooper were working in the garage of their two-story home on a quiet, wooded street, about 500 feet south of Lake Steilacoom. She was just entering the house, and he was stepping out to get the couple’s mail.

That’s when she heard the sound of an engine so loud she thought it was drag racers on nearby Gravelly Lake Boulevard.

“And then a split second later, there’s this huge boom,” Liz Cooper recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, they’ve come through the wall.’”

Moments later, she heard a man screaming.

“And with that, my husband turned to me and said, ‘Liz, call 911. There’s been an airplane crash.’”

Flames

Beckett remembers raising his head moments after the crash. He wondered why he couldn’t see out of his left eye. Later, he realized blood pouring from a head wound was covering it.

He could see the back of Ceccarelli’s head. Large parts of the plane were missing. He noticed a small flame coming from beneath the engine cover.

“And then I saw fuel pouring out of the wing root, and I could see it running and puddling, and it’s headed towards a fire,” Beckett said. “So that’s when I got a big kick in the butt and started yelling like a drill sergeant.”

As he crawled from the wreckage, he implored Ceccarelli to get out of the plane.

Realizing Ceccarelli needed help, Beckett crawled through the leaking fuel to reach him.

“Mark turned his head, looked me in the eye and said, ‘Mike, I can’t move.’”

Both of Ceccarelli’s legs were severely broken. The windshield was gone and something had struck his face, destroying one of his sinuses.

Beckett unbuckled Ceccarelli’s harness and pulled him from the cockpit.

With flames doubling in size every second, the 6-foot-tall Beckett tried using his legs but couldn’t understand why they weren’t working. He looked down. His left leg was twisted at a grotesque angle.

Are you freaking kidding me? Like, what next?, he thought.

Alternately scooting himself and then pulling the 5-foot-8-inch Ceccarelli, he managed to get them 10 feet away from the wreckage.

Fireball

While still on the phone with 911, Liz Cooper opened her front door and found a scene that could have been from a Hollywood action movie. A man was pulling another from the wreckage of a burning floatplane.

A moment later, the plane exploded in a fireball.

“The entire airplane just went up in one gigantic ball of flames, just like a bomb,” Beckett said.

“The fuel went up with a mighty roar, way up into the fir tree,” Cooper said. The home’s balcony began melting as did other parts of the exterior.

“All I could think of was getting them out of that fire,” she said. “Everything was just scorching.”

That’s when Beckett noticed that both he and Ceccarelli were on fire.

“I squealed like a girl,” Beckett said. But the fuel quickly burned off, leaving one arm hairless.

Meanwhile, Ceccarelli willed himself to roll until the flames, which were mostly on his legs, went out.

“It was the most intense heat I’ve ever felt in my life,” he said.

As Beckett scooted, Ceccarelli crawled up to the Coopers’ porch where Liz Cooper stood. The heat was intense and Beckett feared it would set the house on fire. Ron Cooper had run up the driveway to open the couple’s gate for first responders. He returned to extinguish what he could with a garden hose.

Inside the house

“I kind of feel bad in the retrospect, but I helped myself to that house,” Beckett said. “I just kept going right into the house, pulled myself through the door jamb, and then went to the next wall where I could sit up.”

Exhausted, Beckett asked Liz Cooper, who was 76 at the time, to pull Ceccarelli into the house.

“I said, ‘Give me your hand.’ And he was on his side already and had his arm extended,” she said. “I grabbed it, and he must have helped in some way, because I got him in this house really fast.”

Once the door was closed, Beckett asked for a glass of water. Cooper, the consummate hostess, asked him if he wanted ice in it.

“And then I realized how dumb it was,” she said. “If you’re entertaining people, you ask these things. And he said, ‘No, just water.’”

When she returned, she noticed Ceccarelli’s pants were still on fire. She quickly wetted a towel and threw it on him.

Using Cooper’s phone, Beckett took selfies of himself and called his wife Sheila to tell her about the crash. He sent her the pictures.

Almost immediately, Ceccarelli began apologizing to Beckett.

“I said, ‘Mark, it’s OK. You’re forgiven. You didn’t do anything wrong. Accidents happen.’ Then he went quiet for a while,” Beckett said.

Recovery

Ceccarelli was airlifted from near the scene to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, and Beckett was taken to St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma.

“I don’t think I came really out of the fog, until about my third or fourth day (at Harborview),” Ceccarelli said. “I woke up and went, what the hell. What have I gotten myself into?”

Ceccarelli’s left leg took the majority of the burns and doctors told him it was unlikely that it could be saved. Then, 10 days into his stay, he suffered a heart attack.

“I didn’t even know I had heart disease,” he said.

The heart attack postponed the amputation until June 6 when surgeons removed the badly burned and broken leg. He was released July 14.

Beckett spent three weeks in St. Joseph. He had a plate, rods and their associated screws put into his leg and a skin graft to close the wound.

It was his first time in a hospital, he said, and the experience left him educated and in awe of nurses and doctors.

“To see the love and the care that doctors and nurses give of themselves, it blew me away,” he said.

For the first several months, Beckett used a wheelchair. It took him a year to fully recover.

Love anew

Before the crash, Ceccarelli had met a woman in Indiana online. She found out about the crash while watching TV news at her Midwest home.

“Sometimes I would ask her, ‘Why didn’t you flee?’ and she just basically said, ‘Because I fell in love with you and who you are.’”

The couple were married Feb. 29 and now make their home in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Ceccarelli has learned how to use a prosthetic leg. His grandchildren want him to wear a peg leg so he can dress as a pirate for Halloween.

He returns to his Lake Steilacoom home for business or family reasons. He intends on leaving it to his children. He never misses a chance to visit Beckett.

“Until it happens to you, you don’t have an appreciation for just how precious life is,” Ceccarelli said. “You really find out who your friends are.”

Chief among those is Beckett.

“For the first year, Mark literally called me every day to thank me for saving his life,” Beckett said.

Ceccarelli is unapologetic for the gratitude he showers on the younger man.

“I’m in this airplane crash, and he comes back, crawls through burning fuel to pull me out,” Ceccarelli said. “How many of your friends do you think would do that?”