“Was the Plane Crash that Killed Nancy Parker & Pilot Caused by Tainted Fuel?”

The Delta Sigma Theta Sorority held a memorial ceremony for beloved Fox 8 news reporter Nancy Parker tonight at 7:00 p.m., at McDonogh 35 High School in New Orleans. Tomorrow, at 9:00 a.m., Parker’s family and husband, Glenn Boyd, will hold a public memorial service for her at Xavier University’s Convocation Center.

Parker, 53, and veteran acrobatic pilot, 69-year-old Franklin Augustus, were both killed in New Orleans East on the afternoon of Friday, August 16, 2019, shortly after the stunt plane took off. Augustus reportedly radioed to air traffic controllers that the plane was experiencing some sort of unspecified engine trouble.

Parker’s crash came only one day after NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and his wife narrowly escaped a fiery crash of their own in Tennessee, when the private plane they were in skidded off the runway and burst into flames.

Since Earnhardt’s crash, there have been at least five additional private and small plane crashes in the U.S., to include, Parker and famed Louisiana sports fisherman Theo Bourgeois, who died when the small plane he was traveling in crashed in Saint Bernard Parish.

The NTSB is weeks away from issuing any sort of official findings in the crash that claimed the lives of Parker and Augustus. However, a pilot in California who survived an eerily similar small plane crash on Wednesday, August 21, 2019, may have valuable insight to offer in this recent string of aerial mishaps.

34-year-old David Lesh, who is a pilot, outdoorsman, adventurer, and clothing line entrepreneur from Colorado, crash-landed a $200,000 Beechcraft propeller plane he recently purchased into Half Moon Bay, off the coast of San Francisco. Lesh and his passenger were not injured in the emergency water landing and were quickly rescued by the Coast Guard.

In an interview Lesh gave to The Associated Press, he blamed tainted fuel as the cause of his plane mysteriously failing midair at 3,000 feet. Lesh said that prior to takeoff, he had noticed some “particulate matter” in the fuel and thought that he could siphon off the unknown material. Lesh later theorized that he did not clear all of the foreign substance from the fuel and this “bad gas” caused a mechanical malfunction of his plane.

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