AOPA Air Safety SVP and Former NFL Player Die in Crash

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E365

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Richard McSpadden. Senior VP of the AOPA Air Safety Institute. What a shame. This guy did great aviation safety / crash summary videos for AOPA’s YouTube channel. He was also a former USAF Thunderbirds commander.

Other pilot was “Russ Francis, a former NFL tight end who recently purchased the Lake Placid Airways scenic tour business at the airport” - LakePlacidNews

Crash apparently was in a Cessna 177 at Lake Placid, NY on Oct 1st, 2023. Early reports are engine issues shortly after takeoff.

Two killed in Lake Placid airplane crash identified | News, Sports, Jobs - Lake Placid News

LAKE PLACID — The two people killed in an airplane crash at the Lake Placid Airport on Sunday have been identified as Russ Francis, a former NFL tight end who
www.lakeplacidnews.com www.lakeplacidnews.com



One of his more recent videos.


[Enterprise photo — Aaron Marbone]
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I own a 177RG, so this is of interest to me. There is talk that they tried to turn back to the runway, and the airplane made a hard roll to the left. Sure sounds like a power loss followed by a stall-spin. Every time something like this happens, I'm very hesitant to take my plane up until I find out what happened.

If it's mis-fueling, (unlikely in my opinion) I shouldn't worry, but if it is a failure related to aircraft age or a powerplant problem, I want to know. One item that has destroyed a good number of Cardinals is the "single" dual mag. As a single point of failure, when they break off of the back of the engine, or the internal plastic drive gear fails, the engine fails immediately. I do not have the single-dual magneto.

My plane at SEF, Sebring, FL airport:

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I'm familiar with Russ Francis from his time playing for the San Francisco 49ers. I wasn't necessarily a fan of his (was always a Raiders fan even during the LA days) but he was certainly well known here.
 
Isn't it one of the first things you learn that a forced landing straight ahead gives the pilot much better chances of survival than attempting a turn-back with neither power nor altitude to play with?
 
wings&wheels said:
depends on what is ahead of you and your altitude, but the 'impossible turn' carries that moniker for a reason.
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I dunno, in this case the Cardinal would have simply cut through the smaller trees as it lost speed and would then have had its wings sheered as it slowed. As long as they didn't center punch a large tree they would have been okay.
A turn-back requires 270 degrees of turn, not 180. With no power and no altitude, this would seem to be pretty hard to do. There is always the temptation to try to hold the plane up by pulling back, leading to a fatal stall and spin.
 
On the Cardinal forums, there seems to have been eyewitnesses who stated “he saw a “mist“ coming from it as it went by on the takeoff roll.” And, “Wasn’t running right long before rotation.”
 
I was reading an article about Reno Air Race accident by Richard McSpadden a few days before this happened.

RIP.
 
Cujet said:
... One item that has destroyed a good number of Cardinals is the "single" dual mag. As a single point of failure, when they break off of the back of the engine, or the internal plastic drive gear fails, the engine fails immediately. I do not have the single-dual magneto. ...
Click to expand...
Is that the O-320-H2AD engine? It had a similar magneto setup. I thought the 177RG had an O-360 engine.
 
MRC01 said:
Is that the O-320-H2AD engine? It had a similar magneto setup. I thought the 177RG had an O-360 engine.
Click to expand...
The earlier RG's have the Lycoming IO360 A1B6 engine, angle valve, 200HP, counterweighted crank, two separate magnetos. (years 1971 and 1972)
The later RG's have the Lycoming IO360 A1B6D engine, angle valve, 200HP, counterweighted crank, with the single dual magneto. (1973 and later I believe)

Many later year Cardinal owners have reverted back to the 1971 style engine with 2 separate magnetos.

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I have no idea what caused the crash, and I am not speculating here. Only that when I looked up the Cardinal crash information on .gov sites, there were at least 14 crashes that were directly attributed to the single-dual magneto failing, or actually breaking off the back of the engine.
 
I listened to the whole press briefing, and he’s not correct about non volatile memory. NVM needs power to store data. But it should retain that data when the power is cut off. The most common NVM today is flash memory.
 
I've been a huge fan of Dash Cam's for cars, and I'm starting to think that a good Dash Cam would be ideal for light aircraft. Starts at power up, and shuts down some time after aircraft power down.

Something like this would be a cheap and easy way to help with incident investigations.

Yeah, I know pilots would be reluctant to have all their mistakes cataloged on video, but in the end, maybe something like this could help reduce the accident rate.

I'm not one of those guys who has "aviation safety" answers. I have no answers, and just a few random thoughts. I do believe that technology is one path towards light aircraft safety. The parachute is one example. The "save me" button is another. And I've always wanted a "get out of jail free" option for engine failures on takeoff and climbout, such as a backup JATO rocket. As absurd as it sounds, there may in fact be a way to carry a device that provides 1500 feet of altitude via raw thrust.

The Turbonique drag race axle was a 1000HP rocket powered turbine for drag racing. A friend and I were talking about the possibility of a much smaller version that could provide 1500 feet of altitude in an emergency.

TurboniqueAxle1-vi.jpg
 
Thought I read or heard it was a photo shoot on the Cardinal. Beech Bonanza A36 took off first (was going to take photos of the Cardinal. Richard was to fly the formations part of the flight as they were taking photos from the Bonanza.

Eye witness claimed after Bonanza took off, the Cardinal's engine turned off while (going through check list?) and they restarted and proceeded with the flight.

If true, that is so hard to believe. When I did my flight training, I had a couple flights scrubbed due to preflight issues (rough Magnetos, etc.)

RIP to the families. Loved Richard's perspective and knowledge.
 
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