Two Fatally Injured In Tuolumne County Plane Crash
Saturday, April 19, 2008 - 09:50 AM

BJ Hansen
MML News Reporter
Groveland, Ca -- A single engine Cessna float plane went down in Tuolumne County Friday evening, and the Sheriff's Office confirms that there are two fatalities.

Lt. Dan Bressler says that the plane crashed near the Cherry Creek Canyon area, about one mile from Cherry Lake. The plane is registered to an individual in the Calaveras County area, but the owner's name is not being released, as the Sheriff's Office is still notifying next of kin.

Personnel from Yosemite National Park were flown in to establish site security last night, and investigative personnel are arriving on scene this morning.

Representatives from the FAA, NTSB and Coroners Office will be assessing the incident. The Sheriff's Office says that the crash scene is only accessible by air travel.

There is no word yet what caused the accident.

Written by [email protected]





I have received word that the fatalities were the new owner that bought out Terry last year and a student.

There is a very cool video of Emma ( Terry's nick name for the C-150 ) at www.norcalaviation.com .

I didn't know the new owner although I have several hours in Emma.

This is just a terrible tragedy.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the families of the aviators...

Any word as to what happened?

As MTV can attest... Floats, struts and spreader bars will let a floatplane tear her heart out to absorb shock and protect the pilot, as long as you hit the ground in a semblance of control.

Gump

as long as you hit the ground in a semblance of control

Sounds like the key to any landing, forced or otherwise.

Hammer wrote:Sounds like the key to any landing, forced or otherwise.

But especially so in a floatplane. That'd be my first choice for engine out over rough country.

Gump

Wow, I did the upholstery in that plane and know Terry quite well. My heart goes out to the familys. Sad.

Friday Evening Crash Victims Identified
Sunday, April 20, 2008 - 12:35 PM

Bill Johnson
MML News Director
Sonora, CA -- 38 year old Edmond Thomas "Ned" Snyder of Elk Grove and 56 year old L. Dave Cunningham of Walnut Creek have been identified as the deceased in the Friday evening private plane crash in the Cherry Creek Canyon area.

Saturday afternoon their bodies were extricated by coroner's investigators and flown from the wreckage according to Lt. Dan Bressler of the Tuolumne County Sheriff's Office.

Due to the deaths, the crash is under investigation by the FAA and the NTSB. Investigators from those agencies were at the scene of the crash Saturday.

Written by [email protected]

Here is Emma at the Clearlake Splash In:

Tragic. I'm really interested to read the preliminary findings on the cause.

Must be a very odd feeling when a plane you've flown a lot of hours in is destroyed in a crash.

Z,

It is a weird feeling. I saw Terry (the previous owner) and her son last week when I stopped in at Calaveras (CPU) for fuel. When I left I thought I needed to hook up with the new owner and go fly some floats again, just for fun. Now it's too late, at least with Ned in Emma...

My condolences to the families, I did my SES with Terry in 760.

Chris

It's never easy to hear about the tragedies of other pilots, crew, passengers, and airplanes. My prayers go out to the families and friends.

Matt

I want to share what the local paper has been providing on this accident as many people have been effected both locally and elsewhere. Norcal Aviation has been providing seaplane training in the area for a number of years and many have received their SES from Terry and Ned.

Some of this is replication but I thought in the interest of completeness, I'd provide the articles verbatim.



Plane crash kills two
Published: April 19, 2008
Plane crashes near Cherry Lake

Two people were killed when a green and white Cessna 150 airplane registered out of Calaveras County crashed in a wooded area about 1.2 miles north of Cherry Lake.
Tuolumne County Sheriff's Office Lt. Dan Bressler said this morning identities are not being released pending notification of kin.
The Sheriff's Office received a phone call from the Federal Aviation Administration at 6:04 p.m., confirming there was an aircraft down, states a Sheriff's Office press release.
FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said the airplane had been reported missing from Calaveras County Airport.
"We were getting a signal at our Rescue Coordinator Center in Langley, VA., from the plane's Emergency Location Transmitter, for most of Friday," he said. "Local agencies were notified to search for it."
Gregor said the Emergency Location Transmitter is activated by a crash to start broadcasting a signal pinpointing the airplane's location.
A helicopter crew found the site near the Cherry Creek Canyon and confirmed two fatalities.
Two helicopter crews, one from Intermountain Helicopter in Columbia and the other from the California Highway Patrol, helped with the search and site security.
Personnel from Yosemite National Park were flown in to guard the site overnight.
Investigators from the FAA, National Transportation Safety Board and Tuolumne County Sheriff Coroner's office are accessing the area today.
The area is only accessible by air.


Something that disturbs me in this report is the statement "We were getting a signal at our Rescue Coordinator Center in Langley, VA., from the plane's Emergency Location Transmitter, for most of Friday," he said. "Local agencies were notified to search for it."

The call was finally made at 6:04 pm that a plane was actually down.

I'm going to go out on a limb here but we always flew in the am and had Emma back at Spence by noon or shortly there after.

I am pointing this out only as a precaution against putting all your rescue eggs in the 121.5 ELT basket...

There was also this article in the local paper yesterday:

http://losgatosobserver.com/los-gatos/A ... le_id=0832

Chris

This was in the April 22 DUD (daily union democrat)...

You'll note here we also had another 175 crash at Pine Mt. Lake over the weekend...



Plane crashes being examined
Published: April 22, 2008
By LACEY PETERSON
The Union Democrat

As investigations continue into a pair of weekend plane crashes that killed two men and injured another, a few details emerged about the victims.
On Friday, a Cessna 150 floater airplane carrying Edmond Thomas "Ned" Snyder, 38, of Elk Grove, and Dave Cunningham, 56, of Walnut Creek crashed in a sparsely wooded area about 1.2 miles north of Cherry Lake.
The airplane was registered to Seaplane Ventures, Inc., which is owned by Norcal Aviation in San Andreas. Snyder was the owner-operator of Norcal Aviation, Calaveras County Airport Manager Kathy Zancanella said Monday.
Snyder had a wife named Vicki, also of Elk Grove.
According to Vince Leon, Snyder's longtime friend, he bought the company in the last year.
"We're just so foggy in the mind," Leon said.
Leon indicated the family would wait until the crash investigation is complete before making a statement.
It's unknown what Snyder and Cunningham were doing in that area, or if Cunningham was a student or friend of Snyder's.
FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said the airplane was reported missing from Calaveras County.
The Calaveras County Sheriff's Department could not find a record of anyone reporting it missing, said Sgt. Dave Seawell,department spokesman.
The Tuolumne County Sheriff's Office received a phone call from the Federal Aviation Administration at 6:04 p.m. Friday, confirming there was an aircraft down.
The bodies were removed by coroner's investigators Saturday afternoon and flown from the wreckage, said Tuolumne County Sheriff's Lt. Dan Bressler.
The weekend's second airplane crash occurred Saturday evening near the Pine Mountain Lake Airport in Groveland.
The lone occupant, Bill Cranford, 69, of Alaska, was listed in good condition Monday at Memorial Medical Center in Modesto.
A preliminary investigation shows the plane lost power soon after takeoff and clipped some power lines, flipped over and landed nose down in a ditch at Ferretti and Boitano roads, sheering off its prop, Bressler said.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board will conduct thorough investigations, spokesman Ian Gregor said.
The final reports can take months, he said.
The last week has seen three crashes in Tuolumne County, unusual, though apparently unrelated.
The third crash occurred last Tuesday at Columbia airport, when, according to the pilot, a possible wind shift forced the plane down.
The FAA list more than 60 airplane incidents in the past week in the United States, meaning about 1 in 20 occurred in Tuolumne County.

With a 121.5 activation, RCC suppresses the first hit, though they note it. This is due to the large number of false hits.

As the satellites pass over (roughly once an hour or a little less, depending on where you are), more hits are received. With the second hit, RCC has a very large radius of the possible location of the ELT, based on triangulation from the first two hits.

The third hit gives them a little better solution from triangulation, and so on.

Each of these added levels of resolution reduces the potential search area somewhat. RCC is also requesting ground searches if the hit appears anywhere near an airport, to verify it isn't coming from a parked plane (frequent occurrance).

So, it takes RCC at least four to six hours to really get a decent fix on a beacon.

In addition, if the FAA has an aircraft on a flight plan in the area of the 121.5 signal, they will assume its a real deal pretty early on and launch search assets.

So, no, don't count on a 121.5 beacon getting you help within a couple hours. Or a 406, for that matter, though that should be faster.

Remember, RCC has to determine that this is indeed an airplane, they have to locate and notify search resources nearby the ELT hit, those resources may have to go to the airport, fuel and prepare for a search, then get airborne and fly to the site.

This all takes time. Anyone who isn't prepared to survive for a while in the woods after an accident probably shouldn't be flying over the woods much.

MTV

There's a photo of the crashed plane on the 170 web site...I'd post it but still haven't figured out how to use photos.

Looks like the old stall/spin all over again.

Hammer wrote:There's a photo of the crashed plane on the 170 web site...I'd post it but still haven't figured out how to use photos.

Looks like the old stall/spin all over again.

http://home.nps.gov/applications/photos ... lane%2EJPG

<a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/r.t.alaskaflyer/WebShots/photo?authkey=zA0hk_cpWUc#5192494236157655746"><img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/r.t.alaskaflyer/SA9x_yxwusI/AAAAAAAACNw/b5z7GLjpD60/s400/YOSE%20-%202008-04-23%20-%20Downed%20Plane.JPG" /></a>

On the evening of Friday, April 18th, the California Office of Emergency Services contacted park personnel and advised that the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center was receiving an aircraft ELT (emergency locator transmitter) signal that appeared to be coming from within the park. Yosemite SAR personnel immediately put a contract helicopter that was already in the park on standby, then began making preparations to commit it to a search effort. While doing so, the wreckage was sighted on the ground from a civilian airplane. Ranger/paramedics Keith Lober and Matt Stark were picked up from the Yosemite Valley LZ and flown to the accident site. They determined that the downed plane’s two occupants had evidently been killed immediately upon impact. The plane’s location was found to be just outside the park’s jurisdiction, so the incident was turned over to the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Office.

Contact Information
Name: Keith Lober, Emergency Services Manager

Time to start speculating... Recall that I have insignificant hours of experience compared to the accident pilots, and there is no real information about the crash other than the location and the wreckage.

That is a real shame. After years of training and rehearsing emergency scenerios, why is the cause and outcome always of CFIT situations always the same?

Although this does not technically qualify as CFIT, since it obviously was a nose-in impact, which suggests stall/spin as the final cause of the accident, the events leading up to that suggest a slowing climb to avoid rising terrain.

The high at Merced on April 18 2008 was 87 F, and 65 F at Mammoth. Tuolomne Meadows is pretty high...reportedly 8600 ft. I can't quite determine exactly where they found the wreckage, but suffice to say it was at a pretty decent elevation and moderately warm OAT, where climb performance on a float-equipped C-150 is going to be very marginal. According to the FAA aircraft registry, this aircraft was equipped with an O-200, not an O-320 as someone earlier in this thread suggested.

If they gambled on climb perfomance, and flew into rising terrain, there is no amount of elevator gymnastics that can get you over it. Perhaps they gambled on a thermal, or ridge lift to get them to a safe altitude, and that didn't pan out. Either way, they weren't going to clear the terrain.

Say you find yourself in that scenario.... Plenty have before: Berk Snow, to name one that we know well. If you cannot determine that you will safely outclimb the terrain at Vy (or Vx in smooth air...Vy and Vx being fairly close at higher altitudes) then make a 180 and get on a track that takes you back down the valley, or circle to climb if you have enough terrain clearance to makes 360's at a safe margin of airspeed.

As a final, last ditch effort to not stay alive, I think a pilot has to make a very quick and difficult decision to sacrifice the aircraft. Controlled flight into terrain in this case is much preferred to uncontrolled freefall. As MTV has attested, the undercarriage of a float equipped plane can absorb a lot of impact force. I'd rather fly my plane into trees an hope for the best than fall out of the sky and suffer an almost certain nose-first impact. Perhaps somewhere in the middle of those 2 scenarios is ideal for an emergency landing in rough terrain.

I'm just thinking out loud. If they had equipment trouble, that's a whole different story.