Aircraft Crashes into NY Building

I don't know my way around NYC, but isn't Lola & Bernie's place on the East Side? Does anyone know if they were close to this building?

The building involved today is six blocks downtown from our store. I didn't hear the impact and wasn't aware until someone passing on the street told me of a plane hitting a building. I got down to a location two blocks away perhaps ten minutes after impact. The fire department response was amazingly quick and they had hoses on the fire (from inside) perhaps twenty minutes after impact and the flames were extinquished in about another twenty minutes.

Police, ambulances and fire vehicles just descended on the area from all directions. I've never seen anything quite like it.

Great to learn you folks are OK, Bernie - thanks for checking in.



Interesting note here - seems those following this thread got a much better picture of what was going on, as it was going on than did just about anybody else

Any news about people on the upper floors? They must be okay, I'm thinking...

The plane seems to have been registered to NY Yankees pitcher Corey Lidle. He may have been the pilot.

The Phillies weren't enamored of pitcher Cory Lidle's hobby of flying a four-seat airplane.

But now that Lidle is with the Yankees, it's an especially sensitive topic.

In 1979, Yankees catcher Thurman Munson died when a plane he was piloting crashed near his home in Canton, Ohio. Lidle earned his pilot's license last offseason, and has insisted his plane is safe.

"The whole plane has a parachute on it," he told The New York Times. "Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land.

"But, if you're up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly."