Ask the pilot
The possible scenarios that may have led to Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle's fatal plane crash into a New York skyscraper.
By Patrick Smith
Read more: New York, Technology & Business, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot
Reuters/Keith Bedford
Smoke billows from the side of a building where a small aircraft crashed into it in New York Oct. 11, 2006. Inset: Cory Lidle.
Oct. 12, 2006 | When it comes to security, suffice it to say that these days we're a bit too tightly wound. Is that an overly brazen indictment of our national consciousness? I think not, especially when airplanes are involved. Looking back over the past five years, there have been plenty of comparative non-events that nearly became national emergencies -- from fears of unknown perpetrators allegedly zapping pilots with laser beams, to exaggerated claims of imminent catastrophe at the hands of terrorists with liquid explosives.
On Wednesday, when a light plane slammed into a condominium tower in Manhattan, killing New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and one other passenger, the hype machine was primed and ready. No airplane crash should ever be taken lightly, and New Yorkers are certainly entitled to a bit of jumpiness when anything overhead goes boom. But it wouldn't be too cynical to think that there are those in power prepared to exploit such incidents, those eager to get the NORAD generals jogging through their corridors and the F-16s roaring overhead. Alert Code Orange -- and has the president been notified?
He was. But battle-scarred New Yorkers, to their credit, remained calm and composed as details of the crash emerged. By all accounts, Gotham's citizens understood quickly that this was not the second coming of Mohammed Atta, and went about their business with the appropriate level of concern for the victims.
Good for them, and good for America, allowing us to turn to the accident itself and ask: How, exactly, does such a thing happen?
Not easily, but it's critical to begin by drawing a line in the sky. That line puts commercial airliners and their crews on one side, and general aviation aircraft (i.e., private planes) and their pilots on the other. Not to demean the skill and expertise of thousands of license holders and aircraft owners nationwide, but these are very different worlds with separate rules and protocols affecting everything from pilot medical standards to cockpit equipment.
There's a tendency to equate commercial flying with recreational flying in more ways than are warranted. Seven years ago, when John F. Kennedy Jr. lost control of his Piper Saratoga and crashed into the ocean near Martha's Vineyard, much was made of a dastardly phenomenon called "spatial disorientation." Good god, people wanted to know, what if an airline captain were similarly to lose his bearings? Such thinking neglected to consider that airliners are flown by vastly more experienced crews with vastly more sophisticated equipment.
Although it was merely a single-engine Cirrus -- a high-performance, four-seat model about the size of a car -- that impacted the Upper East Side building, it could have been a 757, right?
Theoretically, except that a plane hitting a building requires one or more of the following circumstances, all of which are far more likely to affect a private craft than a commercial one:
1) An incapacitated pilot.
2) A pilot who is lost, and in weather or darkness that restricts visibility such that a 50-story tower becomes invisible.
3) A catastrophic malfunction that has rendered the machine uncontrollable.
4) A less than catastrophic malfunction or problem that distracts or otherwise leads the pilot to commit a fatal, and entirely avoidable error.
5) It wasn't an accident at all.
Taking the last point first -- because in America, 2006, we have to -- it was hard from the outset to imagine a terrorist's rationale for steering a small aircraft into an anonymous residential building. Granted, not all air crimes are perpetrated by terrorists. We remember, among others, the 15-year-old who steered his single-engine Cessna into a high-rise in downtown Tampa in January 2002. There was also the man in 1989 who hijacked a two-seater (from the same flight school I once attended) and peppered the streets of Boston with fire from an automatic rifle. And there was Frank Eugene Corder, the student pilot, high on crack, who in September 1994 crashed a stolen Cessna four-seater on the South Lawn of the White House, killing himself on impact.