WABC-TV is reporting that the plane which crashed into that apartment building on New York's Upper East Side was registered to Yankees pitcher Corey Lidle. Mr. Lidle, who was believed to be piloting the aircraft, died in the crash, along with three other people.
Lidle's death came 27 years after another Yankees player, All-Star catcher Thurman Munson, died at the controls of an aircraft he was piloting. Munson was practicing touch-and-go landings at the Akron-Canton, Ohio airport in August 1979 when he failed to lower the flaps on his Cessna Citation jet, causing it to crash short of the runway.
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According to media outlets and the FDNY, a small plane has crashed into the upper floors of a building on the city's Upper East Side. According to the FBI, there are no indications that the crash was a terrorist act.
Live video from WABC-TV.
WNBC-TV is reporting that at least two people were killed in the incident. Bodies were found in the street below the burning apartments, along with luggage, presumably from the aircraft.
Streaming video from WCBS-TV here.
2 comments:
I'm inclined to consider the crash of any aircraft into a high-rise structure (especially in NYC) as evidence of terrorism until demonstrably proven not.
Spook, recall there was a significant amount of interest placed in a Aussie Defence dept white paper by one Carlo Kopp on the subject of crude EMP weapons use and proliferation, back in 1997. His white paper was titled "The Electromagnetic Bomb - a Weapon of Electrical Mass Destruction", and it was picked up and popularized by Popular Mechanics in [interestingly] their August, 2001 issue.
Post 9/11, I noticed that this white paper was suddenly propagating all over the internet. In fact, a Google search today pulls up Maxwell AFB's website as the first "hit" of the search.
One of Kopp's main assertions in this white paper was that basically anyone with a degree in EE could build a crude "Explosively Pumped Flux Compression Generator" for less than USD$500. Hypothetically, one could be dropped by a GA aircraft over, say, Redmond WA, causing quite a bit of economic damage.
Another threat that could apply to GA aircraft would be the use of MANPADS by small aircraft that violate airspace near international airports. This may sound far-fetched until one realizes that with the southern border as porous as it is, sneaking in MANPAD components via Coyotes is entirely possible, and a fully laden 747 - or A380, whenever that white elephant goes into revenue service - would be a very tempting target.
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