Cory Lidle's plane crashes in NYC

Fucking overkill on MSNBC as Hardball's College romp is pre-empted for ... at this point... beat-a-dead-horse coverage.

 

Will say this, at the risk of politicizing this....

Can you guys believe that planes are allowed to fly there, 5 years after 9/11?

 

"ESPN reported that Lidle's wife, Melanie, was on a commercial flight headed for California and was not on board Lidle's plane. ESPN also reported that Lidle called in fuel problems shortly after takeoff. "

--mlb.com story

http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/news/article.jsp?ymd=20061011&content_id=1708962&vkey=news_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb

 

Too bad he didn't feel he could deploy that parachute over the East River.

 

Wow dude, that's a little harsh. Especially today.

 

Notice that the list of athletes dying in plane crashes doesn't include Nile Kinnick of Iowa, maybe because it wasn't in a civilian crash. But he was more well-known than almost everyone on that list, except for Munson, Lema and Clemente, and maybe Graham Hill.

 

good call on kinnick...

of course, i went to nile c. kinnick high school, so i'm a bit biased

 

Just turned on the tube and wondered why ESPN was covering this...wow. RIP.

 

Two things I have learned today that really piss me off:

1. The reason flights are still allowed to cloak Manhattan is because of lobbying of the FAA on behalf of super-rich, GOP-heavy pilots groups.

2. Who the fuck is Steinbrenner to confirm Lidle's death before the authorities got a hold of his wife?

 

I don't blame Steinbrenner at all...the Yanks had to comment, as all the news organizations RAN with this story and identified Lidle way before Steinbrenner made his comment.

 

Thoughts and prayers with the families of all affected.

At the risk of jumping to conclusions early on in the investigation, there's a couple things that seem sadly common here.

You get a guy like Cory Lidle or JFK Jr., these guys who have enough money to buy a nice plane. You give them the necessary training, which is a minimum of 40 hours to get a private pilot license -- the average student takes about 70 hours to finish. The first thing these guys do upon finishing their private license is go buy some swanky new plane. They do the 10 hours of training required for insurance, and off they go.

So you've got a low-time private pilot flying an advanced aircraft. It's a recipe for trouble.

The NY Times article says that Lidle had about 95 total flight hours. Even if that was from the spring, I can't imagine that Lidle got a chance to fly much during the season. Maybe he did. Like I said, I dont know and I'm just speculating. But even if he did manage to fly a bit during the season, I can't see him having more than 130 hours of total time, and who knows how much he had in the Cirrus, probably considerably less.

So you've got a out-of-practice, low-time private pilot flying an advanced aircraft. In the busiest airspace in the world. And the weather is marginal at best. And then a fuel problem develops.

They say about accidents that it's rarely one big thing that goes wrong that causes them. It's a sequence of little things that set someone up for an accident.

It does look like he had an instructor on board, which helps to minimize his risk. But he's still rusty and all those other factors still apply. Marginal weather. Rich guy bought more plane than he can handle as a low-timer. Busy airspace.

I wonder how much time the instructor had specifically in the SR-20. But what sticks out to me right now is the fact that these two had some sort of apparent fuel emergency, and that if it developed into the point where they lost their engine (who knows?), then why did no one pull the parachute? The big selling point on the Cirrus is the fact it has a chute for such emergencies.

Anyway, I digress. Again, I am only speculating, and my prayers go out to the families.