Aircraft Crashes into NY Building

I will say the disgustingly salacious implication offered by one member here seems to stand incontravertably at odds with known facts pertaining to the incident aircraft's occupants.

I think you mean you could NOT care less.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Some like to be objective and not rush to conclusions.

cjhsa, you do know that, contrary to early reports, the flight instructor who was flying with Lidle was a man, right? Or are you adding accusations that (married) Lidle was gay to your offensive little stew?

I hope those two commercial pilots don't fly for a national passenger airline. If that is all they can come up with in agreement with the unnamed member

speculation as valid at this time as a mile high incident.


again speculation based on as much info as cj used.

It is amazing what some people turn their thoughts to when tragedy strikes.

Apparently, Lidle was in the plane with his flight instructor. The men, their wives and families had been together on a trip to NY. The families were going home by commercial aircraft, while Lidle and his instructor were to be taking 4 days to get across the continent in the small plane.

What a tragedy. Two families destroyed!

OK, earlier reports said the instructor was female. I'm not trying to insinuate Lidle was gay by any means, so I withdraw my comments. Apologies to Timber as well.

Now, it will be very interesting to find out exactly what did happen.

Hopefully this tragedy or act of incompetence or whatever it was won't harm general aviation, one of the last bastions of free spirits.

Some people just don't get it. The revulsion was not over whether the instructor was a man or a woman. The revulsion was over the insensitive and yes, idiotic comment made in the first place.

Some may have already seen this article, but for those who haven't -

NY Times article about the flight instructor, with commentary from a variety of pilots

A clip from the article -

Aviator Was Skilled, but in Unfamiliar Skies

By SERGE F. KOVALESKI and ALAN FEUER
Published: October 13, 2006
To those who knew him, Tyler Stanger was the real deal: an aviation enthusiast who had hung around a small private airport east of Los Angeles since he was 17 and become both a mechanic and a pilot, an unusual combination.

But Mr. Stanger's passion for planes did not translate into swagger. As a pilot and a flight instructor, he was cool and meticulous, former students and friends said, a stickler for safety measures like checklists who seemed more mature than his 26 years.

Most of his work was in the wide-open skies of the American West. He and the Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle, also a Californian, had become friends, and that was one of the reasons why Mr. Lidle asked him to come east to help him fly his new single-engine Cirrus SR20 airplane back to California this week.

Still, for all his experience, it appears that Mr. Stanger had flown a loop around Manhattan and up the East River only once, according to a former student. Mr. Stanger took the stretch about two years ago after he purchased a Cessna 172 in the New York area to use for flight instruction. "He told me that after he bought his plane, he flew the route around the Statue of Liberty and up the river," recalled the student, Jason Paul, 23.

On Wednesday, he and Mr. Lidle were killed when the pitcher's plane slammed into a 42-story building on the Upper East Side.

If this was Mr. Stanger's second time up this section of the East River, then Mr. Stanger was traveling with little experience through a patch of urban air that many veteran New York City pilots say they make a point of avoiding.

They say that pilots try to keep from doing what Mr. Lidle's plane did: turning left sharply between the east and west banks of the river in an attempt to avoid going into La Guardia Airport airspace.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board said yesterday that the pair had told air traffic controllers they intended to make the left turn and that they were traveling at 112 miles per hour when last glimpsed on radar. The investigators said the plane had gone to 500 feet from 700 feet in roughly a quarter of a mile, but gave no suggestion as to why.

Investigators said they were not even sure who was flying the plane, a sporty four-seater.

Local pilots with experience traveling through New York City's busy and tricky airspace said that Mr. Lidle's plane appeared to have followed the rules when he turned left, but that they knew better alternatives: either pilots get clearance from La Guardia, which would not have been a problem on Wednesday; or just skip the East River altogether and go up the Hudson River; or request permission to turn right and make a U-turn that carries them over a sliver of Queens.

One pilot said that he would rather run the risk of receiving a citation by flying without permission through La Guardia airspace than attempt the left turn.

Pilots are allowed to fly without contact with air traffic controllers up the East River to Roosevelt Island's northern tip in what is known as an "exclusion" devised to keep small craft away from larger craft and to reduce radio traffic with controllers in congested New York. To fly north past the island, a pilot needs to request the clearance from La Guardia.

Without a clearance, however, the pilot must make the 180-degree turn in the confined space above the river banks ?- a width of about 2,000 feet.

"It's like a box canyon," said Ken Nurenberg, who has flown in the New York area for 30 years, but has never flown in a fixed-wing aircraft up the East River. "You go in, but you have to turn around to get out. You're not allowed off the river and it's pretty narrow."

Stanley Anderson, who owns AviateRight, a flight school in Farmingdale, N.Y., has flown the route 50 times, but always with a clearance to continue on from La Guardia. "I would never even try to do a 180," he said. "No way."

Mr. Anderson said he did not allow customers to fly the route because, as he put it, "there's no room for error." He added that if he even if he did not get clearance from La Guardia, if it was a question of safety, he would probably enter its airspace.

Other pilots said skilled aviators who understand local conditions should be able to handle the turn.
end/quote


The article goes on in detail for another page.

Another NYT article - Mentions details not consistent with stall.

OK - below, we have the Air Chart segment showing the area of Lidle's flight - I've picked out in red the pertinent stuff; the narrow VFR corridor (the narrow solid blue line inside the red box), and its Northern dead end. The entire width of the gap between the two sections of skyline - buildings - flanking the river is around 2000 feet, less than half a mile.



While some sort of equipment failure still cannot be ruled out as contributory, looking at this leads me to suspect pilot error even more strongly as a major factor. According to FAA reports, the plane was flying Northward along the corridor at around 700 feet, then, at or very near the "Dead End", performed a sharp retrace ("U-Turn") maneuver during which the plane descended below radar - "dropping off the scope". Since the building was struck about 350 feet above street level, it is reasonable to conclude the plane continued to loose altitude as it performed its retrace maneuver. Now, folks used to viewing the world through a ground-bound vehicle's windshield may have difficulty with this concept, but in an airplane, what you see out the windows is governed by the plane's attitude. In a steeply banked turn, it is not only conceivable but highly likely the plane's occupants could not see the building as they closed on it; the cabin's roof would have been in the way.

Also, it is not at all uncommon - in fact it is notably characteristic - for a rookie pilot performing a sharp turn to loose altitude through the maneuver. While eyewitness reports from uninformed individuals indeed are unreliable, when multiple reports consistently highlight something in the same manner - in this case engine sound and the plane's apparent control difficulties, it is reasonable to conclude something is behind the similarities.

I now think what happened is that the plane attempted a "U-Turn" at the end of the corridor, its occupants lost sight of the obstructions toward wich they were traveling, at something in the vicinity of 110MPH (per radar track info before contact was lost) - a few hundred feet goes by real quick at around 100MPH; a second equates to just short of 1500 feet of travel. By the time they realized, if ever they realized, they were lined up on the building, it was too late by far to do anything about it, whether or not everything about the plane otherwise was functioning normally.

I'm still puzzled about a few things - one thing that just doesn't seem to make sense to me is why Stanger would have gone along with the idea of entering that corridor in the first place. Apparently, it was not a flight track with which Stanger was familiar - one very credible source indicates Stanger's flight log shows only one entry, a few years back, for that corridor, so apparently it was a route with which he was not particularly familiar. The route in well known to local pilots as not one to be attempted without considerable experience; I'm not familiar with it myself, but from what I've gathered, its a route avoided by most private pilots, an often crowded route flown mostly by well experienced commercial sightseeing and local transportation pilots.

Short version: with or without equipment failure, it appears to me at this point that pilot error was a major, perhaps primary, factor. Did the plane attempt too sharp a turn, bringing on a stall? Very, very possibly, and if so, opportunity for correcting things would have been even more severely limited, as the plane would not have been fully under control - a very, very bad thing to have happen when there isn't much air between plane and terrain.

I think you may have an extra zero in that feet of travel/sec estimate. That seems high, but the rest is very plausible. I always hated high wing aircraft because the wing blocked your view of the direction of travel during a turn.

Correct or incorrect (and I lean toward correct) an excellent post, Timber.

Was Lidle's plane a high wing design?

You're right about the extra zero - carelessness and lack of preview on my part - sorry.

No need, I just drive really fast and that seemed like a large number of feet in a second.

BTW - the Cirrus is not a high-wing design. That doesn't mean the cabin's roof doesn't block vision of whatever is on the other side of it from the plane's occupants, which would likely be a factor in a steeply banked turn.

For any who might be interested, a bit on timber's airtoy (which IS a high-wing type) may be found HERE

Gee- these tough guys scare me to death. Mi knees is knocking. I'm in a muck sweat as Bella Cohen said.

Is testosterone addictive?