Pilot Rick Briggs, 65, of Cuyahoga Falls, who founded SeniorTV, dies in plane crash near Pittsburgh
Passenger who died of injuries at Pittsburgh hospital days after crash identified as Parma man.
This story has been updated with additional information.
A Cuyahoga Falls man who founded a television programming company for seniors used in retirement and nursing homes across the country died Wednesday in a plane crash north of Pittsburgh.
Rick Briggs, 65, the founder of SeniorTV, died when the single-engine Cessna 210 he was piloting crashed in Pine Township, about 14 miles north of Pittsburgh.
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According to the Mercer County coroner, Briggs died from blunt-force trauma after the plane crashed in a wooded area and caught fire. The plane was experiencing mechanical problems prior to the crash.
A passenger was taken to a Youngstown hospital with burns and crash-related injuries and later moved to a Pittsburgh hospital. He died at the hospital Saturday morning of burns and inhalation injuries received in the accident. He was identified Monday as Keith Vanover of Parma.
WKBN Channel 27 in Youngstown reported that a National Transportation Safety Board official said the plane was scheduled to travel from Westchester County, N.Y., to Akron.
Crews on the scene Saturday removed the plane from the wooded area it crashed in, WKBN reported. The plane had landed at Clarion County Airport in central western Pennsylvania to fix an oil-pressure issue, an NTSB official told the station. It crashed 19 minutes after departing the airport.
Briggs found business success with SeniorTV, a company he started in 1992 to provide cable TV programming tailored to the interests of senior citizens. By 2012, the service was available in 1,400 long-term care centers in 40 states.
That year, SeniorTV moved to new headquarters on Tallmadge Avenue in Akron after experiencing rapid sales growth. Employment climbed from 25 to 40 as the company saw increased interest for the low-cost SeniorTV service following the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009.
Briggs added a MessageNOW channel, which allowed residents to view menus and see live feeds of chapel services, and PlaybackNOW, a system that accessed movies on DVDs. The company also began offering high-speed internet.
By 2019, SeniorTV had expanded to 2,300 long-term care facilities and was sold to Sentrics, a Chicago company focused on a variety of services for seniors. Briggs stayed on as president of the service and became an executive vice president at Sentrics.
In August 2020, after leaving Sentrics, Briggs joined the board of directors at Blonder Tongue Laboratories Inc., an Old Bridge, N.J., company that designs and manufactures telecommunications and cable television video transmission technology.
A statement on Monday from Blonder Tongue cited Briggs' humor, business acumen and creative thinking as a member of the board.
"He was both a colleague and a friend and he will be sorely missed,” said Bob Pallé, a director and former chief executive officer of Blonder Tongue.
In 2015, Briggs received the 2015 Meritorious Service Award from the East Central Ohio Pilots Association.
Asked to fill in for the man scheduled to present the award, Briggs began reading the prepared speech, discovering he was the recipient about a minute into the remarks.
He told former Akron Beacon Journal columnist Bob Dyer that ECOPA members had played a practical joke by getting the award winner to praise himself.
“This is a set-up!” he told Dyer was his response, realizing he had been tricked into introducing himself.
Briggs graduated from Kent State University in 1978.
Friends on social media mourned the loss of Briggs, described by many as a good man and great friend. Briggs’ family could not be reached immediately for comment. Funeral details were not immediately available.
Leave a message for Alan Ashworth at 330-996-3859 or email him at aashworth@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @newsalanbeaconj.