Yankee Pitcher Cory Lidle’s Plane Crashes into NYC Skyscraper

Wednesday afternoon brought back memories of the terrifying events of Sept. 11 five years ago, when a small private plane registered to Cory Lidle, the pitcher for the New York Yankees, crashed into the side of a condominium tower on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The explosion caused by the crash rained flaming debris on the sidewalks below and cast a pillar of black smoke over the city. Flames roared out from four windows on two adjoining floors.

Police have said that the two people were killed and Lidle was on the plane when it crashed, but no official word has been given on whether Lidle was among the casualties. A law enforcement official said that Lidle's passport was found at the scene, and he is presumed to have died.

The plane was evidently carrying two passengers, Lidle and a flight instructor. It left New Jersey's Teterboro Airport, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, at 2:30 p.m., about 15 minutes before the crash, according to officials at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The plane issued a distress call just before it crashed.

The plane hit the 20th floor of the Belaire, a tower overlooking the East River about five miles from where the World Trade Center used to stand. "I just saw something come across the sky and crash into that building," said Young May Cha, a 23-year old Cornell University medical student. "It looked like it was flying erratically for the short time that I saw it." People who were in the building when the plane hit felt the shake and heard the explosion, so they quickly evacuated. Firefighters quickly extinguished the fires in less than an hour.

Former NTSB director Jim Hall told a reporter that he doesn't understand how a plane could get so close to a New York City building after the events of 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.

The Belaire tower was built in the late 1980s and is located near Sotheby’s auction house. The 183 apartments in the building sell for more than $1 million apiece. Several floors are occupied by administrative offices and physicians’ offices, in addition to guest facilities for family members at the Hospital for Special Surgery. No patients were in the building at the time, according to hospital spokeswoman Phyllis Fisher.

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said that there is no evidence the crash was a terrorist attack. "The initial indication is that there is a terrible accident," he said. However, fighter jets were sent aloft immediately over major U.S. cities as a precaution upon first reports of the crash. A spokeswoman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs told reporters that the fighters were sent out "as a prudent measure" even though there was every indication the crash was an accident.

All three New York City-area airports continued to operate normally after the accident, and neither President Bush nor Vice President Dick Cheney moved to secure locations. Knocke told reporters, "There is no specific or credible intelligence suggesting a threat to the homeland at this time."