New York – Investigators and workers in hard hats gathered up the scorched pieces of New York Yankee Cory Lidle’s shattered plane at a luxury high-rise Thursday in a floor- by-floor sweep for clues to why the aircraft crashed.
The pitcher and his flight instructor were killed when their plane slammed into the 40-story condo tower Wednesday.
Crews recovered the nose, wings, tail and instrument panel of the plane along with a hand- held GPS device as they conducted an exhaustive search of the building, said National Transportation Safety Board member Debbie Hersman.
Men in hard hats lifted pieces of wreckage from the street and placed them neatly on a silver- colored tarp in the bed of a pickup. Neighborhood children gathered to gawk at the jagged and twisted metal, glass shards, and charred wing and door.
Hersman said the single-engine plane was cruising at 112 mph at 700 feet of altitude as it tried to make a U-turn to go south down the East River. It was last seen on radar about a quarter-mile north of the building, in the middle of the turn, at 500 feet.
“Early examination indicates that the propellers were turning” at the time of impact, Hersman said, suggesting the engine was still running.
More details also emerged Thursday about the flight instructor who was with Lidle aboard the four-seat Cirrus SR20 during the sightseeing flight around Manhattan. Tyler Stanger, 26, operated a flight school in La Verne, Calif.
He and Lidle apparently planned on flying from New York to California this week, after the Yankees’ defeat in the playoffs over the weekend.
“They were going to fly back together. It was right after the loss to Detroit,” said Dave Conriguez, who works at an airport coffee shop in California that Stanger frequented. “Tyler’s such a great flight instructor that I never gave it a second thought. It was just, ‘See you in a week.”‘
The crash prompted renewed calls for the government to restrict New York airspace to help ensure that planes cannot get close to the city’s skyscrapers.
