High and Inside

A terror scare in New York today as a plane hit a high rise condo:

NEW YORK -- A small plane with New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle aboard crashed into a 50-story condominium tower Wednesday on Manhattan's Upper East Side, killing Lidle and three other people and raining flaming debris on sidewalks, authorities said.

Federal Aviation Administration records showed the single-engine plane was registered to Lidle, and FBI reports show that Lidle's passport was found at the scene. The FBI believed Lidle was the only person aboard the plane and the other three deaths occurred inside the building.

Lidle crossed the picket line at spring training in 1995 following the '94 players' strike. He pitched for seven major-league teams beginning in 1997 with the Mets. He also pitched for Tampa Bay, Oakland, Toronto, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and finally the Yankees, who acquired him before the trade deadline in July along with outfielder Bobby Abreu.

For his career, he was 82-72 with two saves and a 4.57 ERA.

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.

When I saw it was a Yankee involved, my thoughts flashed back to 1979 when catcher Thurman Munson crashed his private jet while practicing landings, killing himself in the process. It was quite a shock to the baseball world, and especially the Yankees.

As a former private pilot myself, I'm a little mystified how this could have happened accidentally. Skies appear to be somewhat cloudy in New York, but certainly nothing that would have made a 50 story building invisible. It appears that this was a sightseeing flight that somehow went terribly wrong. I'm wondering if there may have been some type of control malfunction on the airplane rather than just pilot error. Lidle was a fairly low time pilot, but conditions weren't such that even a low-timer should have had that kind of problem. I'll be interested to see how this all turns out.

One other thing to note - the emergency response on the part of city fire and police agencies in New York appeared to work perfectly, and I also heard that NORAD had scrambled fighters over various other cities in the country just in case. It looks to me that some of the big lessons of 9/11 were learned and that the first responders are far more ready today than they were on 9/11.

UPDATE: Hugh Hewitt has some info on the type of aircraft involved.

More info on the airplane:

A player-pilot is still a sensitive topic for the Yankees, whose captain, Thurman Munson, was killed in the crash of a plane he was flying in 1979. Lidle, acquired from the Philadelphia Phillies on July 30, said his 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.”

Unless you run it into a 50 story building. Then what's left of the plane goes down very quickly.