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Nauset Light Beach

TOUCHING DOWN

Small Plane Lands on Eastham Beach After Losing Power

With two passengers aboard, Chatham pilot makes emergency landing on quiet back shore

By Jack Styler and Cam Kettles Jun 19, 2024

This article was updated on June 20, 2024.

EASTHAM — A small tour plane made an emergency landing between Marconi Beach in Wellfleet and Nauset Light Beach in Eastham Sunday afternoon, according to the Wellfleet Police Dept. The pilot and two passengers — a man and his 12-year-old daughter — were uninjured.

On the day after the June 16 emergency landing, all that was left were tracks in the sand. (Photo by Jack Styler)

Stick’n Rudder Aero Tours pilot Charles Ernst landed the plane, a single-engine Cessna 172, 15 minutes after the plane lost power. The flight originated at Chatham Municipal Airport. Wellfleet Fire Chief Rich Pauley said Ernst had determined he was unable to fly back to Chatham or make it to Provincetown before landing on the beach around 3:45 p.m. Sunday.

“The aircraft’s engine was losing power for reasons unknown at this time,” wrote Timothy Howard, the president of Cape Aerial Tours, in an email, “so a safe emergency landing site had to be selected by the pilot.”

By the time a reporter and photographer from the Independent arrived at Nauset Light Beach before 7 a.m. Monday, all that was left to see were a pair of larger-than-ranger-vehicle-size tracks in the sand.

Pauley, who spoke to the pilot and passengers at the scene, said they appeared unscathed.

“They seemed better off than I would have been,” Pauley said.

Howard told the Independent that the plane’s nose and propeller were damaged during the landing, and that the aircraft’s future was uncertain pending an assessment of its possible repair. Though the plane ended up closer to Marconi Beach in Wellfleet, first responders could not access the plane there because of the steep dunes that line the Wellfleet beaches.

The Wellfleet fire and police departments and National Park Service rangers set up a staging area south of the plane in the Nauset Light Beach parking lot. Once it was determined that the passengers and pilot were all uninjured, the process of getting the plane off the beach began: its wings were removed, and over the course of two hours, a Park ranger’s truck slowly pulled the plane approximately two miles down the beach.

Meghan Lynch, a wedding photographer from Weymouth, arrived at Nauset Light Beach just as Wellfleet first responders pulled into the parking lot. For the next two hours, Lynch watched as the emergency vehicles made a slow but steady march, airplane in tow, toward where she was watching from near the path to the parking lot. She hadn’t taken any pictures.

“Everything on the beach was still super normal,” said Lynch. “The surfers were still in the water.”

The Federal Aviation Administration and National Park Service are both investigating the incident.

Howard said that the company was cooperating with the FAA’s investigation and that it had suspended all its tours on Monday for a “safety stand down and review.”

Chatham Municipal is a public-use airport, meaning that it is shared by charter flights, tour companies, and private airplane owners. Cape Aerial Tours, which according to public records was established in September 1998, operates out of the airport. Howard — the company president — is also the airport manager.

The company offers tours around the Outer Cape. Sunday’s flight was headed to Provincetown before it lost power.

The Cessna 172 Skyhawk is the most common single-engine plane in the world, one of two planes advertised on the Stick’n Rudder Aero Tours website. The one involved in Sunday’s incident was built in 1963, according to FAA records.

Beach Landings

Emergency landing guidance from the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association is to land on long stretches of beach with wet and firm sand when the area is not crowded. The alternative, a water landing, exposes passengers to hypothermia before rescue.

Justin Green, an aviation attorney in New York, said that returning to an airport is usually preferable to a beach landing, depending on the surf and beach conditions, including how crowded the area is.

“It sounds fortunate,” Green said of the Sunday landing. “A lot of people get in trouble trying to get to the perfect landing spot.”

Green said how compacted the sand is could affect the plane’s landing gear, tipping the plane forward or flipping it completely.

Sunday’s landing was not the first time the back shore has been used as a makeshift runway.

“The beaches for an emergency landing spot on the Cape are probably about as good as it gets,” said Dan Wolf, the former CEO of Cape Air who has been flying planes on Cape Cod for more than 46 years.

The incident didn’t seem to rattle him. “Aircraft engines are reliably maintained, overhauled at regular intervals, and they’re inspected regularly,” said Wolf. “Occasionally, something will go wrong, but it’s very rare.”

Wolf told the Independent that, when making a descent onto a beach, the first priority is flying into the wind so that the plane can slow down as much as possible. A Cessna 172 would likely be moving at only 35 to 40 m.p.h. when it touched down if wind conditions were favorable, Wolf said.

The Cessna 172 has a glide ratio of about 10 to 1, meaning that it travels about 1,000 meters horizontally for every 100-meter loss of altitude. Wolf said that pilots are trained to glide without power.

Wolf recalled that when he was manager of the Chatham Municipal Airport in the mid-1980s, a pilot in a Cessna 172 made a similar emergency landing on an oceanside Eastham beach a few miles south of Sunday’s incident. That plane, he said, sustained only limited damage to its landing gear and propeller.

According to Wolf, in the 1950s and 1960s elective beach landings on Cape Cod were commonplace. Pilots in small planes would land to go fishing on the back shore’s then-remote beaches.

There have been at least three other small plane landings on beaches so far in 2024, according to local reporting from Miramar Beach, Fla., Cedar Beach, N.Y., and Half Moon Bay, Calif. No fatalities were reported in any of them.

CONFLICT WITH THE PARK

Parking at Nauset Light Causes Rift Between Eastham and NPS

Select board says the Park Service is violating their 2022 agreement on the beaches

By Elias Schisgall Aug 2, 2023

EASTHAM — The select board and Town Administrator Jacqui Beebe are demanding that the National Park Service allow Eastham residents full access to the parking lot at Nauset Light Beach, accusing the Park of violating an agreement with the town over use of the lot.

A diagram of the Nauset Light Beach parking lot, with the Park Service section in green and the Eastham section in pink (Courtesy Cape Cod National Seashore)

Beebe and board chair Art Autorino said they would be sending a letter to National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom this week following more than 50 reports that Eastham residents had been denied access to the lot, Beebe said. The letter demands that Carlstrom resolve the issue within one week.

The parking lots at Nauset Light and Coast Guard Beach, the other Park Service-managed beach in Eastham, are divided into two parts: one-third of the spaces are reserved for Eastham taxpayers and the other two-thirds are designated for visitors with Park Service passes. Normally, select board members said, the NPS portions of the lots are fuller, while there tends to be space in the areas reserved for Eastham locals.

But over the last month, Beebe said, the town has received dozens of reports of Eastham residents being denied access to free parking in the NPS portion of the Nauset Light Beach parking lot when the Eastham section has been full. A daily pass at Park beaches costs $25.

The letter argues that the Park Service’s refusal to accept Eastham taxpayer stickers violates a 2022 agreement setting terms for parking at the two beaches. It states that the NPS must “continue to maintain and provide Taxpayer parking spaces at NPS-managed lots, to honor current year taxpayer stickers, and to allow Taxpayers to park anywhere in NPS-managed lots.”

The letter also says NPS ignores the terms of a 1965 deed conveying the beaches from Eastham to the Park Service on the condition that Eastham taxpayers reserve “the right to use [Nauset Light] beach and adjacent waters for swimming, the adjacent parking area, and without charge.”

“The deed is not ambiguous, and the Board will not agree to relinquish any rights for its residents and taxpayers,” Beebe and Autorino wrote in the letter.

The letter demands “that the agreements be honored immediately.”

National Seashore Deputy Supt. Leslie Reynolds on Monday defended the Park Service’s interpretation of the 1965 deed and 2022 agreement, saying that Eastham residents were not entitled to park in non-Eastham spaces without paying.

“We still manage our lot for the visiting public, which we charge a fee for,” Reynolds said. “So, if the Eastham lot fills up and an Eastham resident comes over to our lot and says, ‘I can park here because I’m an Eastham resident,’ the answer would be ‘No.’ ”

Reynolds maintained that the terms of the deed were being honored. “They are swimming, they are parking, they are enjoying the beaches like it says in the deed,” she said.

But Autorino, Beebe, and select board member Aimee Eckman all said the agreement and deed required that Eastham residents be given free access to the entire parking lot, not just the spots reserved for Eastham residents.

“It’s pretty clear-cut — we can park in any spot,” Autorino said. “We allowed the Seashore to take over our beaches. But the caveat was that we would always be able to park for free.”

“We want to have them hold up their end of the deal, fair or not,” Eckman said. “I just don’t get why they’re digging their heels in.”

The letter to the Park Service makes no mention of legal action. But during a July 24 meeting, the select board hinted that such a move might be on the table if NPS refuses to change its position.

Carlstrom “has to understand that if he continues to say we can’t do it, then our recourse is legal,” Autorino said. He suggested giving Carlstrom one week to respond.

Beebe said if the Park Service does not resolve the situation, “We would confer with counsel about any next steps.” She said the board may go into executive session with town counsel during its next meeting on Aug. 8 if needed.

The Park Service and the town also seem to disagree over the legal weight of the 2022 parking agreement. Reynolds insisted that it was “not a contract” and not legally binding. “A general agreement is more like, we agree to this, and it’s on paper, and you have two signatures,” she said.

But Beebe said she understood the agreement to be legally binding, saying the divide between “contract” and “agreement” was a distinction without a difference. Autorino concurred: “Why is it not a legally binding contract? They signed it, and we signed it.”

“The most upsetting part of this for our select board and for me personally is that we have always had a really close, collaborative working relationship with the Park,” Beebe said. “How can we sign an agreement and have such different views of what that agreement actually says? It seems shocking to me.”

During the July 24 meeting, Beebe said she had spoken to Carlstrom, who she said defended the Park Service’s actions out of “fairness” concerns for nonresident beach visitors. She said Carlstrom wanted to amend the agreement and clarify the Park Service’s interpretation. But town officials said they were uninterested in renegotiating the five-year agreement, noting that the negotiations for the 2022 agreement had been protracted.

Those negotiations largely concerned the loss of parking space at Nauset Light Beach due to erosion, which Reynolds said was ongoing: “Someday, that parking lot will be in the ocean.” She said the Park Service was engaged in long-term planning to establish offsite parking for the beach.

This is the second time in the past few months that the Park Service has been accused of failing to uphold its side of an agreement with Outer Cape towns. In May, the Park Service issued a request for proposals to lease eight historic dune shacks in Provincetown and Truro that appeared to ignore a 2012 agreement about how the properties could be leased, prompting objections from select boards in both towns.

SUMMER PARKING

Latest Plan Keeps Number of Eastham Resident Spots the Same

But erosion and bath houses mean fewer places at Nauset Light Beach

By Cam Blair Apr 6, 2022

EASTHAM –– The town and the National Seashore are close to finalizing a plan for parking at both the Coast Guard Beach and the reconfigured Nauset Light Beach lots this summer. Overall, Eastham residents will get about the same number of spots they’ve had since the last parking plan was made five years ago.

At Coast Guard Beach, residents will gain 4 to 14 spots, depending on the time of day. The plan calls for a total of 24 spots reserved for Eastham residents, but of those, 10 would be set aside for park ranger programming each morning until 11. Previously, the total number of spots reserved for residents at Coast Guard Beach was 10.

The updated parking arrangement at Coast Guard Beach would increase the number of spots reserved for Eastham residents by 24 after ranger programs end at 11 a.m. (Image courtesy Cape Cod National Seashore)

At Nauset Light Beach, 15 resident-only spaces have been lost. Proportionally, the agreement holds steady the residents’ share of available spaces. It reserves 57 spots (or 39 percent of the total), including three accessible spots, for Eastham residents. Previously, Eastham had 62 spots (38 percent of the total).

Erosion is the main culprit in the losses at the Nauset Light lot, said member Aimee Eckman at the select board’s March 28 meeting. After a February storm closed the lot for several days, the Seashore installed a new fence along the ocean side to keep visitors from getting too close to the edge.

Anticipating further erosion, the Seashore is building bath houses at Nauset Light as far as possible from the ocean. In January, Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom said the Seashore hopes to get 20 years of use out of the new bath houses.

Those bath houses, too, are occupying space previously devoted to parking. One change that will make up for some lost spots: the Seashore will reduce the width of all parking spaces from 10 to 9 feet.

The Park is also considering another change. Select board chair Art Autorino reported on March 28 that, “after lots of discussion,” Carlstrom agreed to meet with town officials to discuss permitting visitors to be dropped off at Nauset Light — an idea the Park has previously opposed.

Now, Eastham residents will enter to the right of the visitor fee booth at Nauset Light. The path to the beach will also be moved. (Image courtesy Cape Cod National Seashore)

Autorino also said that the Seashore plans to explore the potential of a satellite parking site across from Nauset Regional High School. The Seashore owns a swath of woods on Cable Road and will need to come up with a parking solution once erosion wipes out the current Nauset Light parking lot.

“I think it could only benefit us, as a town, and the school for events happening in the new performing arts center once it’s built,” Eckman said of the idea. Town Administrator Jacqui Beebe noted that the Seashore is taking a “serious” look at expanding its shuttle service to Nauset Light. The shuttle currently runs from Little Creek Parking Area on Doane Road to Coast Guard Beach.

Also on March 28, the select board announced that the dept. of public works and the Seashore are planning to build a sidewalk down the length of Cable Road. A small sidewalk currently runs from the Three Sisters lighthouses to Ocean View Drive.

The contract has not yet been signed, but the Seashore came to the town with the new numbers, according to Eckman. “We pitched the idea of managing the parking lot and giving all the parking to Eastham residents,” said Autorino at the select board’s March 7 meeting. “That was about a two-nanosecond conversation,” he added.

The 1963 deeds that transferred property from the town to the Seashore specified that Eastham residents be allowed to park and swim at Coast Guard and Nauset Light beaches without charge. An Eastham beach sticker is still required to prove residency and costs $25, according to the town’s website.

Over the years, access to the beaches for local residents has been an ongoing concern. The every-five-year parking plan agreement between town and Park became the norm in 2007, explained Eckman.

The bath houses at Nauset Light Beach on March 11. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

In 2005, a group called the Eastham Ocean Beach Committee attempted to persuade voters to support the construction of a new town-owned beach and parking lot on Ocean View Drive between Coast Guard and Nauset Light. The idea failed to win a two-thirds majority vote at town meeting, Eckman said.

At the time, Eckman joined the Eastham Citizens for Responsible Coastal Development, which opposed the plan. Clearing trees for pavement and the maintenance demands of another lot were their main objections, Eckman said.

In 2007, the town and the Seashore agreed to the every-five-year routine of setting aside a certain number of parking spaces for Eastham residents, she said.

NATIONAL SEASHORE

Nauset Bath Houses to Be Done by Summer, Says Carlstrom

But the Seashore supt. says parking lot is not for the ages

By Cam Blair Jan 12, 2022

EASTHAM –– After 14 months of work beleaguered by supply-chain disruptions, labor shortages, and a storm that overturned a mobile office trailer, the new bath houses at Nauset Light Beach are 60 percent complete, according to Cape Cod National Seashore (CCNS) Supt. Brian Carlstrom.

“It’s on track to be done by May,” Carlstrom said. The project was originally scheduled to be finished by last summer, but 60 spots in the 90-space parking lot were fenced off for last year’s peak months and remain so. Last summer was particularly frustrating to beachgoers trying to navigate the eastern sliver of the parking lot that remained open because on many days no work was being done despite the construction equipment and mounds of dirt.

Three unfinished bath houses sit at the western edge of the Nauset Light Beach parking lot behind scattered construction equipment. (Photo by Cam Blair)

“It might look like things are going slow from time to time, but they’re progressing,” said Carlstrom. The project’s $2.1-million budget has not been affected by the elongated timeline, he said. “A whole litany” of shortages contributed to the delay, said Carlstrom.

A much larger problem for the Seashore is the Nauset Light parking lot. The northeast corner of the lot is currently cordoned off because of erosion under the bluff. Carlstrom said the National Park Service fenced off the area out of an abundance of caution.

“That parking lot is not going to be there long-term,” he said. “It’s changed dramatically from when the park was created in 1961. It’s going to continue to change.”

Erosion hits the entire area hard. Nauset Light Beach Road, which runs parallel to the coast, was relocated last year. The stairs at Nauset Light Beach had to be repaired four years in a row before they were abandoned altogether in favor of a path winding behind the dune. The old bath houses at Nauset Light had to be demolished in 2017 because the bluff had eroded so much that the septic tanks were within 10 feet of the edge, according to then-Supt. George Price.

Carlstrom believes that the new bath houses will survive 20 years of erosion. “Hopefully, longer than that,” he said.

Carlstrom noted that the Park Service has already begun planning for the day when the parking lot will be no more. He said the Seashore would likely use a shuttle system similar to the one currently serving Coast Guard Beach and Little Creek parking lot on Doane Road. While the Seashore owns 125 acres of woods in Eastham running north from Cable Road to the Wellfleet town line, Carlstrom said that he would like to avoid land clearing in any future parking solution. One possibility, he said, could involve collaboration with Nauset Regional High School, but nothing is set in stone.

Maintaining an Aging Park

Wooden fencing blocks off the northeast corner of the parking lot. Signs warn that the area is unstable and “can collapse at any time.” (Photo by Cam Blair)

The bath house project is just one of many multimillion-dollar deferred maintenance efforts for which Carlstrom must find funding. According to the CCNS website, the park needs $48.9 million for such projects. The Seashore is currently demolishing 40 structures “that have been underutilized or are in poor or worse condition.” These include the dilapidated homes formerly occupied by Air Force members and their families at the Highland Center in North Truro.

The CCNS recently completed a $2.1-million renovation of Highland Light in Truro. In 2021, it finished badly needed repairs at the Coast Guard Station in Eastham. Carlstrom said the Seashore completed a number of water and septic projects in the past several years.

So is the Seashore, which is responsible for maintaining 300 buildings and six public beaches, chipping away at its deferred maintenance faster than it’s adding new projects?

“I’m not sure we’re quite there yet,” Carlstrom said. “But it’s getting better.”

GRAVEYARD SHIFT

A Life-Saving Beacon in the Fog of Politics

Nauset Light Society honors the memory of its keepers

By Amy Whorf McGuiggan May 19, 2021

EASTHAM — The offshore waters of Outer Cape Cod, with their hidden sand bars, took so many vessels and lives that the stretch from Chatham to Provincetown came to be known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Less than a decade after the Lighthouse Establishment was founded in 1789 — the first federal agency responsible for construction and maintenance of lighthouses — Highland Light in Truro became Cape Cod’s first sentinel, keeping watch over the Peaked Hill Bars. A decade later, twin wooden towers were built at Chatham.

ENVIRONMENT

Spotter Pilots Help Scientists Study Sharks

In the skies, a remarkable dance across the fishing-science divide

By Johnny Liesman Aug 27, 2020

On a hot summer day in 2008, Wayne Davis was flying his Citabria, a single-engine two-seat propeller plane, off the shores of Cape Cod, looking for bluefin tuna. With nearly 40 years behind him as a spotter pilot for commercial fishermen, Davis was thinking about retirement.

ENVIRONMENT

23 Park Structures at ‘High Risk’ From Climate Crisis

Officials design movable structures in response to erosion

By Elspeth Hay Aug 23, 2019

TRURO — The climate crisis is “the greatest threat to the integrity of our National Park Service that we have ever experienced, and we’re at the forefront of it,” according to Cape Cod National Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom.

Responding to that threat includes getting creative with practicalities like dune stairways and beach bathhouses. That’s because one of the Park’s priorities is to preserve public access to the shore.

“The first site I came to here in 1986 you can no longer visit,” Carlstrom said, referring to an older configuration of Marconi Beach’s visitor access in Wellfleet.

About 35 people came to Payomet Performing Arts Center in North Truro on Aug. 14 to hear Carlstrom talk about the effects of the climate crisis on local Park Service facilities.

“We have a lot of resources in the near shore environment,” Carlstrom said. “We’ve analyzed over 200 structures and found 23 in total to be very high risk.”

Beach grass plantings at Herring Cove. — The National Park Service put in 600,000 beach grass plants and over 52,000 other native beach plants at Herring Cove in Provincetown as part of an effort to repair visitor access following the development of an erosion hot spot in that area between 2012 and 2018. (Photo Elspeth Hay)

Carlstrom showed slides of changing National Park lands from around the U.S., ranging from a dramatic photograph of a pronounced “bathtub ring” in the Lake Mead Recreational Area in Arizona and Nevada, where water levels have dropped over 100 feet in 20 years due to drought, to a disappearing Klondike Gold Rush glacial field in Alaska.

Here on the Outer Cape, he said, sea level rise and erosion are the most immediate challenges.

New access configurations at Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown and Nauset Light Beach in Eastham are two recent projects that model a new strategy for accommodating visitors where erosion is intense. One of the Park’s strategies, CCNS maintenance chief Karst Hoogeboom told the Independent in a phone interview, is “to reduce the amount of structure at the beach and just have the essentials there.”

Because erosion is so unpredictable, the National Seashore is now also designing beach facilities to be movable, according to Carlstrom.

“The average long-term rate of retreat at Herring Cove Beach has been 2.5 to 3 feet per year for more than a century,” said Mark Adams, a geographic information specialist and coastal geology technician with the Park Service, via email. “It’s difficult to simplify, but the Herring Cove north parking lot was subject to a rapid erosion hot spot from 2012 to 2018.” This area now seems to be protected by the growth of a barrier spit from Hatches Harbor.

Ensuring structures are easier to move starts with building them strong enough to withstand a move, according to Hoogeboom.

And if buildings are being moved, that means plumbing will be, too. Park staff are considering various plumbing choices for beach facilities.

“In some locations we’ve done vault toilets, which are a toilet building with, in effect, a big container underneath that you pump out periodically,” Hoogeboom said. The Herring Cove facilities are hooked up to the Provincetown sewer, and the Nauset facilities will have a title 5 septic system.

The bathhouse complex and concession stand at Herring Cove is a model for the entire Park complex, Carlstrom said, because they were designed to make moving them straightforward. Though given current erosion patterns, he added, “We don’t anticipate having to do so for at least a decade.”