'I'm always thinking where we would land'

Scott Murphy, a flight instructor at Rochester Air Center in New York, launched a young student's first training flight on May 28 and signed on with air traffic control for flight following to the practice area. Once level at 3,500 feet, an unusual smell caught his attention.

"I started smelling something burning," Murphy recalled in a phone interview. "At first I thought it was electrical."

Murphy, 41, earned his flight instructor certificate at ATP Flight School, a career change after roughly two decades working as a diesel mechanic. "I worked on a fleet of buses," he said. "I'm very well versed in burnt electrical. That's what it smelled like to me." He scanned the instruments for something that could confirm his diagnosis. No red lights, no unusual rise in temperature or pressure on the gauges, and the annunciator panel was quiet. The smell, however, persisted, and within moments a faint haze began seeping into the cockpit.

Murphy took the controls, declared an emergency, and began planning for a return to Rochester while evaluating potential landing sites below as the smoke persisted. "It wasn't heavy, but you could see it. There was a haze in the air and it looked like it was coming from behind the cowling," Murphy recalled. While Murphy was diagnosing an abnormal situation and communicating with ATC, the airplane was slowly losing power. "As it was getting worse, I started feeling vibrations in the plane, like something going on with the engine. So that's when I realized it wasn't electrical anymore, or I assumed it wasn't," Murphy said.

With a return to Frederick Douglass/Greater Rochester International Airport now ruled out, ATC vectored Murphy toward Ledgedale Airpark near Brockport. Aboard the Cessna, Murphy scanned the ground as the smoke thickened. "I had landing spot after landing spot as I was searching for the airport as backups." That approach was a habit built long before this flight. "I'm always thinking where we would land if this happened now and that happened," he said.

Murphy had Runway 28 at Ledgedale in sight when the deterioration escalated. "I heard a pop-slash-bang sound, and that's when the windscreen got covered in oil," Murphy said. At this point, neither he nor his student could see outside the cockpit except by using just their peripheral vision and visual references along the sides of the runway.

Amid rapidly changing circumstances, Murphy remained in continuous communication with ATC. A post-incident review of the audio by the AOPA Air Safety Institute found that both sides of every transmission stayed calm and professional.

The Air Safety Institute's analysis of the FlightAware track revealed a textbook energy management sequence. Murphy had maintained 3,500 feet until the airspeed bled back to best glide, then he established a controlled descent, holding 78 mph, slow and steady. He performed a necessary forward slip on final as he noted he was too high. The slip introduced a sudden airspeed excursion from around 80 knots to 100 and back.

It was only later when Murphy and the student were safely out of the airplane that they understood the full extent of what had happened. "It wasn't even until minutes later, I realized the propeller was gone," Murphy noted.

While uncommon, propeller separations have occurred before. In 2019, aerobatic pilot and instructor Spencer Suderman safely landed a Pitts after losing a propeller in flight. As in Murphy's case, the exact cause of the mechanical failure was not relevant to managing the emergency. Success hinged on the pilot's ability to maintain control, manage energy, and reach a suitable landing area.

In his debrief on June 4, Murphy credited his successful management of an evolving emergency to the disciplined preparation and the study habits he developed during training. "I always read the POH, especially Section 3, the systems section," he said. "Just practice the terrifying emergencies is a big thing. I've always done that. Watching videos like that of what people did wrong, what people did right."

Although his diagnosis changed frequently during the event, his priorities remained constant: Fly the airplane, find a landing site, and use all available resources to get on the ground.

Despite being unable to see directly ahead, Murphy recalled that the landing was surprisingly smooth. He and his student unbuckled and exited the aircraft promptly after he brought the Cessna to a stop on the runway, and the CFI with about 640 hours total and 300 dual given was soon able to see, for the first time, the magnitude of the damage. The cowling had partially separated, bent sharply downward, and was streaked with oil.

"I reached out to my instructor as soon as I could and [thanked] him. I had the same instructor for private, instrument, and then my multiengine ratings," Murphy said. "He ingrained some of the stuff into me for the emergency scenarios."

Photos of the propeller soon surfaced on social media, with one blade visible and the other dug deep into the ground in a field. Nobody was injured, and no property was damaged.

Murphy's gratitude extended to his employer and colleagues at the Rochester Air Center, who had a present for the CFI to commemorate the day: a clean pair of underwear wrapped in a sectional chart, "with Ledgedale on top of it, circled for me," as if he might ever forget.

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