Plane crashes into Building in NYC..... reportedly not Terrorism

[u2sarajevo]

about 1:59PM CST... NOT TERROR RELATED
_____________________

Aircraft Crashes Into Manhattan Building

A small aircraft crashed into a high-rise on the Upper East Side, setting off a fire and startling New Yorkers, police said. There were conflicting reports on whether the aircraft was a small plane or a helicopter.

Fire Department spokeswoman Emily Rahimi said an aircraft struck struck the 20th floor of a building on East 72nd Street. Witnesses said the crash caused a loud noise, and burning and falling debris was seen. Flames were seen shooting out of the windows. Video from the scene showed at least three apartments in the high rise fully engulfed in flames.

"There's huge pieces of debris falling," said one witness who refused to give her full name. "There's so much falling now, I've got to get away."

Whether anyone was injured was not known, and it was unclear if the crash was an act of terrorism.

The address of the building is 524 E. 72nd Street _ a 50-story condominium tower built in 1986 and located nearby Sotheby's Auction House. It has 183 apartments, many of which sell for more than $1 million

[capitalcity]

Flashback.

[MavKikiNYC]

MavKikiNYC reported safe.

[MavsX]

Originally Posted by u2sarajevo

about 1:59PM CST... NOT TERROR RELATED
_____________________

Aircraft Crashes Into Manhattan Building

A small aircraft crashed into a high-rise on the Upper East Side, setting off a fire and startling New Yorkers, police said. There were conflicting reports on whether the aircraft was a small plane or a helicopter.

Fire Department spokeswoman Emily Rahimi said an aircraft struck struck the 20th floor of a building on East 72nd Street. Witnesses said the crash caused a loud noise, and burning and falling debris was seen. Flames were seen shooting out of the windows. Video from the scene showed at least three apartments in the high rise fully engulfed in flames.

"There's huge pieces of debris falling," said one witness who refused to give her full name. "There's so much falling now, I've got to get away."

Whether anyone was injured was not known, and it was unclear if the crash was an act of terrorism.

The address of the building is 524 E. 72nd Street _ a 50-story condominium tower built in 1986 and located nearby Sotheby's Auction House. It has 183 apartments, many of which sell for more than $1 million

I'm all over that like a caterpillar on my sunday pants.

[chumdawg]

Whether anyone was injured was not known

I'm gonna guess whoever was flying the plane was.

[MavsX]

Originally Posted by chumdawg

I'm gonna guess whoever was flying the plane was.

sounds logical

[Flacolaco]

All of our New Yorkers here ok?

(and if any of you are living in "1 million" dollar apartments like these we'd like to know anyway....)

looks like someone just made a mistake....why were they flying that low???

[MavKikiNYC]

Edit.

[u2sarajevo]

Reports say it was Cory Lidle's plane? Yankees Pitcher.

[Flacolaco]

holy crap....

[u2sarajevo]

Lidle dies as plane crashes into Manhattan high-rise

NEW YORK -- A small plane piloted by New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashed into a 50-story condominium tower Wednesday on Manhattan's Upper East Side, raining flaming debris onto the sidewalks below and rattling New Yorkers' nerves five years after the Sept. 11 attack.

Lidle died in the crash.

The twin-engine plane came through a hazy, cloudy sky and hit the 20th floor of The Belaire -- a red-brick tower overlooking the East River, about five miles from the World Trade Center -- with a loud bang, touching off a raging fire that cast a pillar of black smoke over the city and sent flames shooting from four windows on two adjoining floors.

[Underdog]

Originally Posted by u2sarajevo

Lidle dies as plane crashes into Manhattan high-rise

NEW YORK -- A small plane piloted by New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashed into a 50-story condominium tower Wednesday on Manhattan's Upper East Side, raining flaming debris onto the sidewalks below and rattling New Yorkers' nerves five years after the Sept. 11 attack.

Lidle died in the crash.

The twin-engine plane came through a hazy, cloudy sky and hit the 20th floor of The Belaire -- a red-brick tower overlooking the East River, about five miles from the World Trade Center -- with a loud bang, touching off a raging fire that cast a pillar of black smoke over the city and sent flames shooting from four windows on two adjoining floors.

Bizarre...

[raefformvp]

I just saw on CNN that Lidle's passport was found in the street. crazy that a piece of paper can survive a crash like that. and can you imagine being the one to find it? that would be bizarre. prayers definitely go out to the victims.

[Caliente]

Originally Posted by MavKikiNYC

MavKikiNYC reported safe.

Thanks for the update.

I guess my prayer to St. Anthony was answered favorably.

[sike]

how terribly sad. just for the record, did he have a history of mental illness or depression?

[irontoad]

My prayers go out to everyone involved with this, and to all the new yorkers who I'm sure had a hellish flashblack because of this...

[Flacolaco]

Originally Posted by sike

how terribly sad. just for the record, did he have a history of mental illness or depression?

well now theyre saying that he just got his pilots license.....

[capitalcity]

10-11-06 upside down reads: 90-11-01

weird.

[nashtymavsfan13]

Wow, so Lidle, the Yankees pitcher, died?

[nashtymavsfan13]

Yankees pitcher presumed dead after plane crashes into high-rise in New York City

By COLLEEN LONG, Associated Press Writer
October 11, 2006


NEW YORK (AP) -- A small plane carrying New York Yankee Cory Lidle slammed into a 50-story skyscraper Wednesday, apparently killing the pitcher and a second person in a crash that rained flaming debris onto the sidewalks and briefly raised fears of another terrorist attack.

A law enforcement official in Washington said Lidle -- an avid pilot who got his flying license during last year's offseason -- was aboard the single-engine aircraft when it crashed 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.

It was not clear who was at the controls. But the Washington official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Lidle's passport was found at the scene.

Federal Aviation Administration records showed the plane was registered to Lidle, who had repeatedly assured reporters in recent months that flying was safe and that the Yankees -- who lost catcher Thurman Munson in the 1979 crash of a plane he was piloting -- had no reason to worry.

"The flying?" the 34-year-old Lidle told The Philadelphia Inquirer this summer. "I'm not worried about it. I'm safe up there. I feel very comfortable with my abilities flying an airplane."

The crash came just four days after the Yankees' humiliating elimination from the playoffs, during which Lidle had been relegated to the bullpen. In recent days, Lidle had taken abuse from fans on sports talk radio for saying the team was unprepared.

The law enforcement official said the plane had issued a distress call before the crash.

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

"This is a terrible and shocking tragedy that has stunned the entire Yankees organization," Yankees owner George Steinbrenner said in a statement. He offered his condolences to Lidle's wife and son.

The crash rattled New Yorkers' nerves five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, abut the FBI and the Homeland Security quickly said there was no evidence it was anything but an accident. Nevertheless, within 10 minutes of the crash, fighter jets were sent aloft over several cities, including New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Seattle, Pentagon officials said.

The plane came through a hazy, cloudy sky and hit The Belaire -- a red-brick tower overlooking the East River, about five miles from the World Trade Center -- with a loud bang, touching off a raging fire that cast a pillar of black 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.

Large crowds gathered in the street in the largely wealthy New York neighborhood, with many people in tears and some 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," Sara Green, 40, who lives across the street from The Belair. "It crossed my mind that it was something bigger or the start of something bigger."

On Sunday, the day after the Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs, Lidle cleaned out his locker at Yankee Stadium and talked about his interest in flying.

He said he intended to fly back to California in several days and planned to make a few stops. Lidle disccused the plane crash of John F. Kennedy Jr. and how he had read the accident report on the National Transportation Safety Board Web site.

Lidle, acquired from the Philadelphia Phillies on July 30, told The New York Times last month that his four-seat Cirrus SR20 plane 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."

Lidle pitched 1 1/3 innings in the fourth and final game of the Division Series against the Detroit Tigers and gave up three earned runs, but was not the losing pitcher. He had a 12-10 regular-season record with a 4.85 ERA.

He pitched with the Phillies before coming to the Yankees. Began his career in 1997 with the Mets. He also pitched for Tampa Bay, Oakland, Toronto and Cincinnati.

The guarantee language of Lidle's $6.3 million, two-year contract, signed with the Phillies in November 2004, contained a provision saying the team could get out of paying the remainder if he were injured or killed while piloting a plane. Because the regular season is over, Lidle already had received the full amount in the deal.

After the Yankees' defeat at the hands of the Tigers, Lidle called in to WFAN sports-talk radio two days before the crash to defend manager Joe Torre, and said: "I want to win as much as anybody. But what am I supposed to do? Go cry in my apartment for the next two weeks."

Lidle was an outcast among some teammates throughout his career because he became a replacement player in 1995, when major leaguers were on strike.

Among the baseball stars killed in plane crashes were Roberto Clemente, Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder, killed Dec. 31, 1972, at age 38 while en route to Nicaragua to aid earthquake victims; and Munson, the Yankee catcher killed Aug. 2, 1979, at age 32 in the crash of his plane in Canton, Ohio.

"It's just sadder than sad," said New York Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson, who was Lidle's pitching coach in Oakland. "It's horrific. It's almost unbelievable. It's a surreal moment."

Young May Cha, a 23-year-old Cornell University medical student, said she was walking back from the grocery store down 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."

The plane left New Jersey's Teterboro Airport, just across the Hudson River from the city, at 2:30 p.m., about 15 minutes before the crash, according to officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport. But they said they did not where the aircraft was headed.

Former NTSB director Jim Hall said in a telephone interview he doesn't understand how a plane could get so close to a New York City 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.

Mystery writer Carol Higgins Clark, daughter of author Mary Higgins Clark, lives on the 38th floor and was coming home in a cab when she saw the smoke. "Thank goodness I wasn't at my apartment writing at the time," she said. She described the building's residents as a mix of actors, doctors, lawyers and writers, and people with second homes.

Despite initial fears of a terrorist attack, all three New York City-area airports continued to operate normally, FAA spokesman Jim Peters said. The White House said neither President Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney was moved to secure locations.

The Belaire was built in the late 1980s and is situated near Sotheby's auction house. It has 183 apartments, many of which sell for more than $1 million.

Several lower floors are occupied by doctors and administrative offices, as well as guest facilities for family members of patients at the Hospital for Special Surgery, hospital spokeswoman Phyllis Fisher said.

No patients were in the high-rise building and operations at the hospital a block away were not affected, Fisher said.

Associated Press writers Pat Milton, Robert Tanner and Adam Goldman in New York; Robert Weller in Denver; and Leslie Miller and Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington contributed to this report.

[MavKikiNYC]

Since the 1980’s, 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.

Man, this just can NOT be safe, or generally a good idea.

[Drbio]

What a horrible horrible story. God bless him and his family.

[ames7]

This is so crazy and incredibly sad. I just don't understand how it could happen...

His dad found out from the news? That's awful. And his family was on a flight when it happened...at least that way they could be tracked down & told properly.

[Drbio]

My understanding from a CNN report was that they blacked out the news on her flight and took her off asap when they landed. How completely awful. I just ache for her and the son.

[Drbio]

Alec Baldwin is a total asshat. He tried to cross the police barrier after Lidle's plane crash and an officer was quoted as saying that Baldwin tried touse his celebrity status to get into the building.

What an ass.

[mary]

Recalling a now eerie conversation
Schwarz
By Alan Schwarz
Special to ESPN.com
Archive

You read about these things, you watch some hair-netted nitwit peer into Geraldo's camera and declare, "By golly, I was gonna go in that car with him" ... and you roll your eyes, numb to the tale's banality. Someone was always gonna go in that car with him. Or eat that burger. Or take that plane flight.

And then it's you.

About three weeks ago, I was talking with Cory Lidle about his newest hobby, flying. My tape recorder was off. Cory and I chatted about a lot of things over the years. Playing poker. Shooting pool. His newest cell phone. We even occasionally talked about baseball. But not that often. Similar ages, similar hobbies; whenever we ran into each other in Oakland or Philly or now in New York, we'd jabber about anything but work. On this afternoon, in the Yankees clubhouse, we started talking about his new Cirrus SR20.

"You want to go up with me?" he asked.

I was a little flummoxed at the offer but intrigued enough to see if he was serious. He was.

"Where do you live?" he asked me, knowing I lived in Manhattan.

"Upper East Side," I said. "90th and Third."

"Dude" -- Cory was from Southern California -- "you should really come up with me. We can fly right past your apartment building. You've never seen Manhattan 'til you've flown right up the East River. It's beautiful. We can do it one day before a game."

He wasn't kidding. Sufficiently convinced -- and, frankly, flattered -- I mentioned how I've always longed for the guts to skydive. But I had a baby boy in May. I will barely roll craps dice, let alone those.

"My wife would kill me," I said with a wink. "Small planes, you know."

I'd said that a little too flippantly, I guess, because Cory got somewhat serious.

"Totally exaggerated," he said. "You only hear about the crashes."

Having made his point, he said more lightly, "The kind of plane I have will be safer than the cars on the FDR Drive below us."

We got a laugh out of that, because we agreed it was probably true. We talked about flying for maybe another three or four minutes. I distinctly recall being a little befuddled about this East River thing; I asked him why, maybe only six or seven miles from La Guardia Airport, a recreational pilot like himself would be allowed to fly for, essentially, sightseeing. He explained that the Federal Aviation Administration had created zones and procedures to make room for everyone, to create zones where tailwinds from other planes would not be an issue. I'm pretty sure he said it was 4,000 feet.

But it was no big deal. I had work to do. He had work to do.

"How's this," I said. "We'll play poker sometime."

This was actually going to happen. Cory and I had talked about poker quite a bit over the past few years, given how he had run a few charity tournaments for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. We talked strategy, silly my-nut-straight-got-rivered sort of stuff. (Much more fun than my-changeup-got-walloped-by-Pujols.) When Cory got traded back to New York, he said he could use a simple, low-stakes, regular-guy game for an off-night sometime. No ballplayers. Just buddies playing cards. I said my friends and I played every week, and he was more than welcome. He gave me his new cell phone number and joked, "You know my schedule."

In the meantime, he asked for a good place to shoot pool. I told him of a few joints close to his place near Times Square but said that Amsterdam Billiards on the Upper West Side was the place to go. Apparently, he took me up on that. A lot. Enough for people there to see what kind of fellow he truly was.

"He was just one of the guys," Greg Hunt, the owner of Amsterdam Billiards, told me Wednesday. "He wasn't a big guy -- he was like 5-10, 180 pounds, and he fit right in. We had a lot of matter-of-fact conversations about playing for the Yankees, and it was almost like talking to someone about his day office job. Just normal conversation among guys."

Cory came in maybe three or four times a week while the Yankees were in town and took lessons from house pro Tony Robles.

"We'd be in the middle of a lesson, and people would come up to him, and he didn't mind," Robles said. "Every time someone stopped and talked to him, he would stop what he was doing and have a conversation. He never said no. He never had a problem with it. That's what was so special about him."

(One aside that's important to interject right now -- for all of you surprised at this, who assume that players instinctually bark at every autograph request or public annoyance, shame on you, and shame on us in the press who have apparently painted that picture. Most players are incredibly patient and gracious about their celebrity. Here, too, you only hear about the crashes.)

Or, in Lidle's case, when it's horridly late.

When I learned this afternoon of a plane having been flown into an Upper East Side apartment building, my synapses exploded like popcorn. First, as with any New Yorker, came 9-11 and then the fact that, until a few years ago, I lived two blocks from that building and knew several businesses below it. (Mike Piazza in fact lived across the street.) As it became clear this was not terrorism but simply an accident involving a small plane, I thought, "Man, Cory'll be freaked out."

Maybe a half-hour later, a writer friend of mine instant-messaged me that the plane was Cory Lidle's. I figured this was some rumor, but then I remembered our conversation last month, about how he offered to fly me up the East River with him, to see Manhattan from his pilot's eyes.

I picked up the phone and called his cell, the same number he'd given me to get him in on our poker game someday. I heard his greeting -- "Hi, this is Cory ... " -- and after the beep left a clumsy message to the effect of, "Hey, I know I'm gonna be well down on your list of people to call, but if you could put me on there somewhere to tell me you're OK, I'd appreciate it. Talk with you soon."

I hung up with the increasingly ghastly feeling that I never would. And as the news was confirmed that Cory Lidle -- major-league pitcher, father, husband and, well down the list, my friend -- was inside that building still burning 20 blocks south of me, his final words to me about flying wafted by like the sickening smoke.

"Tell me if you change your mind," he said about that East River flight. "You can write about it. Would make a cool story."

http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/column...lan&id=2622245

[fluid.forty.one]

Originally Posted by capitalcity

10-11-06 upside down reads: 90-11-01

weird.

That's nuts

[sike]

Originally Posted by Drbio

Alec Baldwin is a total asshat. He tried to cross the police barrier after Lidle's plane crash and an officer was quoted as saying that Baldwin tried touse his celebrity status to get into the building.

What an ass.

does he live in those buildings??

[ames7]

That Schwarz article is haunting. I never paid particular attention to any of Lidle's teams, but it's still kind of stunning that it was him, you know?