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Bizarre crash kills pitcher, shakes up N.Y.

By TIMES WIRES
Published October 12, 2006

NEW YORK — Briefly stirring echoes of Sept. 11, a small plane carrying New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle slammed into a 40-story skyscraper Wednesday, reportedly killing the pitcher and a second person in a crash that shook New Yorkers still scarred by the attacks five years ago.

A law enforcement official in Washington said Lidle — an avid pilot who got his license during last year’s offseason — was aboard the single-engine aircraft when it when it issued a distress signal and plowed into the 30th and 31st floors of the high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said both people aboard were killed.

Officials declined to release the victims’ names, but the Yankees organization confirmed Lidle, 34, was one of the victims.

It was not clear who was at the controls and who was the second person aboard.

The crash rattled New Yorkers’ nerves, but the FBI and the Homeland Security said there was no evidence it was anything but an accident.  “There is nothing to suggest that anything even remotely like terrorism was involved,” Bloomberg said.

Nevertheless, within 10 minutes of the crash, fighter jets were sent aloft over several cities, including New York, Washington, Detroit, Los Angeles and Seattle, Pentagon officials said.

“In this day and age, obviously everybody is very sensitive when they hear something like a plane crashing into a building,” Bloomberg said.

Bloomberg said a flight instructor and a student pilot with 75 hours of experience were aboard and killed. The pair had circled the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor before heading uptown. Both bodies were found on the street below, and the plane’s engine was found in one of the apartments, Bloomberg said. Lidle’s passport was found on the street below the crash site, the Associated Press reported, citing an unnamed federal official.

Fifteen firefighters, five civilians and a police officer were taken to a hospital with injuries. Among them was a woman who was in an apartment hit by the plane; she escaped the inferno with burns to 15 percent of her body, the New York Times reported.

Federal Aviation Administration records showed the plane was registered to Lidle, who had assured reporters in recent weeks that flying was safe and that the Yankees — who were traumatized in 1979 when catcher Thurman Munson was killed in the crash of a plane he was piloting — had no reason to worry.

“The flying? I’m not worried about it,” Lidle told the Philadelphia Inquirer this summer. “I’m safe up there. I feel very comfortable with my abilities flying an airplane.”

The crash came just four days after the Yankees’ elimination from the playoffs, during which Lidle had been relegated to the bullpen.

“This is a terrible and shocking tragedy that has stunned the entire Yankees organization,” Yankees owner George Steinbrenner said in a statement. He offered condolences to Lidle’s wife, Melanie, and 6-year-old son.

Federal officials said the plane had issued a distress call before the crash. The craft took off from New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport about 2:30 p.m. and was in the air for barely 15 minutes, authorities said. It was not immediately known where the plane was headed.

The FAA said it was too early to determine what might have caused the crash. The National Transportation Safety Board sent investigators.

Since the 1980s, planes and helicopters have been allowed to fly over the East River, as well as the Hudson River, below 1,100 feet, without special permission.

They fly under “visual flight rules,” meaning they avoid collisions by visually keeping track of other aircraft, and maneuvering to avoid conflicts. They are not required to file flight plans. They generally have transponders, devices that make them visible on radar, but they broadcast a generic code that identifies them as general aviation aircraft, rather than giving their particular identity.

Lidle’s plane was unusual in that it was equipped with a parachute in case of engine failure, but there was no sign the chute was used.

The plane, flying north over the East River, along the usual flight corridor, came through a hazy, cloudy sky and hit the Belaire with a loud bang. It touched off a raging fire that cast a pillar of smoke over the city and sent flames shooting from four windows on two adjoining floors. Firefighters put the blaze out in less than an hour.

Luis Gonzalez, 23, was one of several construction workers viewing plans for renovating an apartment in the Belaire when they saw a plane headed their way. “It was coming right at us, directly at us at the floor where we were working on,” he said.

They could see the pilot’s face, he said, and then they saw the plane veering toward the right, as if the pilot was trying to avoid hitting them.

“The whole building shook,” he said. “Then we ran for the elevator.”

Rob Miranda, a carpenter also working in the building, was on the 46th floor and said the plane appeared to be wobbling as it approached.

“He was out of control,” Miranda said. “He was on an incline, accelerating as he passed. Then he hooked around the corner, he hit the north side of the building, and you heard a tremendous explosion.”

At least 21 people were taken to the hospital, most of them firefighters. Their conditions were not disclosed.
Crowds gathered in the street in the wealthy New York neighborhood, with many people in tears and trying to reach loved ones by cell phone.

“It wasn’t until I was halfway home that I started shaking. The whole memory of an airplane flying into a building and across the street from your home. It’s a little too close to home,” said Sara Green, 40, who lives across the street from the Belaire. “It crossed my mind that it was something bigger or the start of something bigger.”

Young May Cha, a 23-year-old Cornell University medical student, said she was walking back from the grocery store down E 72nd Street when she saw something come across the sky and crash into the building. Cha said there appeared to be smoke coming from behind the aircraft, and “it looked like it was flying erratically for the short time that I saw it.”

Former NTSB director Jim Hall said he does not understand how a plane could get so close to a New York building after Sept. 11.

“We’re under a high alert and you would assume that if something like this happened, people would have known about it before it occurred, not after,” Hall said.

Outside Lidle’s home in Glendora, Calif., neighbors quickly converged.  Kevin Lidle, Cory Lidle’s twin brother, said on CNN’s Larry King Live that his parents were “having a tough time.”

“Somehow you hang in there and you get through it,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of calls from friends and family, people calling and crying. And they’ve released some emotions, and I haven’t done that yet. I don’t know — I guess I’m in some kind of state of shock.”

Lidle told the New York Times last month that his Cirrus SR20 was safe.

“The whole plane has a parachute on it,” Lidle said. “Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you’re up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly.”

-- Information from the New York Times, Associated Press, Cox News Service and Bloomberg News was used in this report.

[Last modified October 12, 2006, 06:10:17]