It may only have been a matter of minutes but for many New Yorkers it seemed so much longer — and so terribly reminiscent. A pall of thick black smoke hung over the Manhattan skyline. Bits of the tail wing of a plane lay scattered on the pavement. Two floors of a tower block were engulfed in an intense blaze.
Shortly before 3pm on Wednesday, New York City went through it all again. In 72nd Street on the Upper East Side, just 8km from ground zero, crowds assembled as news spread that a small aircraft had ploughed into the 30th and 31st storeys of the 50-floor Belair building.
Manhattan’s wide avenues were clogged with emergency vehicles and helicopters hovered overhead as crews of firefighters prepared to enter the building. And in the most eerie echo of five years ago, the cellphone networks jammed as people rushed to telephone their loved ones.
Even the Pentagon got in on the act, ordering fighter jets to scramble over several cities including New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Seattle.
And then, details began to emerge. The crash had been of a single-engine light plane that had swerved off its path over the East River. It looked like an accident. And then another telling detail: at the controls had been a celebrity, a pitcher with the United States’s largest baseball club, the New York Yankees. Cory Lidle was identified as the owner of the Cirrus SR20 plane and one of the two victims — the other being his flying instructor.
The city’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, giving a public address shortly after the accident, touched on how New York’s nerves had momentarily been tweaked: ”Everybody is sensitive when a plane goes into a building. But homeland security sees no evidence of anything relating to terrorism or anything remotely like it.”
Lidle (34) had acquired his pilot’s licence only a few months ago and had been planning to head for California where he intended to spend the off-season improving his piloting skills.
Ironically, he had bought the Cirrus model because he thought it was safe. ”The whole plane has a parachute on it,” he told the New York Times last month. ”Ninety-nine per cent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1% that do usually land it. But if you’re up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute and the whole plane goes down slowly.”
On the Cirrus website, the company says its ”revolutionary Cirrus Airframe Parachute System” (CAPSâ„¢) is comprised of a ballistically powered 55-foot (16m) parachute that can lower the aircraft and its occupants safely to the ground during a life-threatening emergency.
The website said the parachute is activated by a simple pull handle, ”and is a safety feature much appreciated by non-flying members who know that in the event of a pilot incapacitation, they can still make it safely to a survivable landing”.
”For even the most highly skilled pilot, events can occur outside the realm of control. Many of these emergencies could result in a fatal crash. CAPSâ„¢ provides one final option—a lifesaving parachute of safety.”
The New York Times quoted one of his instructors as saying: ”He was probably my best student. He learned very, very quickly, and a lot of it is desire. He had huge desire.”
The Cirrus took off from New Jersey’s Teterboro airport, across the Hudson river from Manhattan, at 2.25pm. Radar signals showed the plane circling the Statue of Liberty then flying over the East River alongside Manhattan at 1 500 feet. It then turned into Manhattan and lost height very rapidly to just 400 feet. At that point the radar signal was lost.
A federal official, speaking to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said the plane sent a distress call to the Federal Aviation Authority before it crashed.
Henry Neimark, a pilot who witnessed the accident while driving along the Brooklyn to Queens expressway, said he saw a plane banking very steeply to the left over the East River at a height of 700 or 800 feet. ”It was very odd to see a plane manoeuvring so close to the ground — doing what almost looked like acrobatics,” he said. ”I suddenly saw it hit the building in a huge ball of flames.”
Richard Drutman, a professional photographer who lives on the building’s 11th floor, said he was speaking on the telephone when he felt the building shake. ”There was a huge explosion. I looked out my window, and saw what appeared to be pieces of wings, on fire, falling from the sky.” He and his girlfriend quickly left the building, he said.
Witnesses reported the sense of panic when the plane struck. ”I just saw something come across the sky and crash into that building. There was fire, debris and an explosion,” said Young May Cha (23) a medical student at Cornell University.
A mystery writer, Carol Higgins Clark, who lives on the 38th floor of the building, was coming home in a cab when she saw the smoke. ”Thank goodness I wasn’t at my apartment at the time,” she said.
The FAA said it was too early to determine what caused the crash. One question the authorities will address is how the plane managed to reach airspace above residential areas of Manhattan, which has been strictly prohibited since the September 11 attacks five years ago.
Firefighters injured
Twenty-one people — most of them firefighters — were taken to hospital.. Two people in an adjoining apartment miraculously escaped injury. Apartments in the E. 72nd Street luxury high-rise, called the Bellaire Condos, can sell for upward of $1-million (about R8-million).
Large crowds gathered at the crash scene, with many people in tears and others trying to reach loved ones by cellphone. Rain started pouring at the scene at around 4pm.
Surreal
A South African travelling in New York on business at the time, JP Farinha, told the Mail & Guardian Online on Wednesday that it felt ”surreal” to hear the news of the crash on the radio in a cab.
”My first thoughts were predictably of a terrorist attack but it was ruled out quite quickly. Once the full story emerged what struck me most was the fact that a private plane was able to fly so close to Manhattan without even a flight plan.”
”I would have thought that after 9/11 it would be near impossible for something like this to happen. It makes you wonder how many other easy opportunities for terrorist attacks still exist in cities across the world,” he said. – Guardian Unlimited Â