Just happened a few minutes ago. Kind of scary to think how that could have happened. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,219921,00.html
I thought they closed off flying around the island after the WTC went down. and what were they doing on the East Side? I remember you had to call in for clearance to fly thru when it was allowed.
Could have been one of those flashy Sloan-Kettering docs flying to work. (p.s. I had spent some training time there.)
Nope. NY Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle. No joke. http://www.newsday.com/am-plane1012,0,225622.story?coll=ny-baseball-headlines&track=mostemailedlink
pretty scary, especially for anyone living in NYC. i know a lot of athletes have things in their contracts, such as no skydiving, no hunting, etc. to protect the owner's investments, i wonder if steinbrenner knew of his intentions on getting his pilot's liscence, or if he had anything to say about it.
R.I.P. But, how does this happen? Was this a suicide or something? It's interesting how the building didn't topple like the WTC? Controlled demolition makes all the difference Seriously, a very tragic incident.
I dont get how any one could crash a plane into a 50 story building and no one knows why. When flying through New York Airspace you are allways in radio comunication with ATC, so he would have had to declared an emergency, Plus unless there was a engine failure i dont see a way that that plane could have gone down. And I have flown a Cirrus so i know what im talking about, I am a pilot.
So it could have very easily been an engine failure, an electrical failure, a fire, bird strike or some other problem that put the plane down. The priorities in an emergency are aviate, navigate then communicate. The stories indicate he is very low on hours (~95) so he probably had his hands full trying to deal with the emergency rather than communicating with ATC.
The weather looked pretty poor. I don't think he was IFR-rated, so it really could be a result of disorientation. Flown several Cirri, the chute is useless in CFIT accidents. It was an 02 SR20, I don't remember if that year had glass PFD and MFDs. The 22 I think did. RMX
i wonder if he had a flight instructor with him. from what i've read, i believe it's some kind of mechanical failure. i mean, when you're on top of the world (or seemingly) as a pitcher in the major leagues, why would you want to commit suicide?
It pretty clearly HIT the building so I only have to assume the BRS wasn't deployed. The Cirrus is a safe hi-tech aircraft but it won't save you to pop the chute if your over a scary LZ - and the upper east side of Manhattan certainly qualifies. I think it's possible some low time moneyed pilots are putting too much faith in the ballistic parachute thing (Angelina Jolie?) it's still a high performance single and to a low time pilot things can happen pretty fast - and 95 hours is low time to be driving it around New York. Don't get me wrong it's a tragedy and the Yankees seem to have bad luck with this sort of thing (remember Thurmon Monson?) Just to show you how nervous we still are the market dropped 50 points when this hit the tape...
Take a look at the Teterboro radar track. Set the time to 2:29 (14:29) and watch the other aircraft around it. The tail number was N929CD. You'll see another aircraft around the same altitude heading toward it along the river. Evasive action? Possible stall/spin accident? http://www4.passur.com/teb.html RMX
Probably disorientation and the poor weather. Unacceptable if that's what it was. Similar to the Robert Kennedy crash i.e. inexperience and taking unnecessary risks. Very unfortunate.
10/11/06 is actually 90/11/01. I use the Arabic calendar, i dunno what drugs...i mean... calendar you use. (SMILE)