Metadish, Fresh from NYC

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Just days after the Yankee season had ended in disappointment last October, it was punctuated by tragedy.

Cory Lidle boarded his private plane, a Cirrus SR20, at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey to take a farewell flight around Manhattan before heading back to California to be with this family for the off-season. It would be the last flight he’d ever take.

NYC was briefly hurled into reminders of a day that didn’t seem that long ago when planes intentionally flew into buildings. With Lidle, a novice pilot, this was not the case.

However, a new report by the National Transportation Safety Board with no amount of uncertainty lays the blame of the accident squarely on the pilot and his instructor who was on board with him at the time of the crash.

“Inadequate planning, judgment and airmanship” is what caused the crash the NTSB said in its findings.

The two men could have safely completed their U-turn over the East River and avoided an apartment building if they had either kept their turn very sharp from beginning to end, or given up on making it within legal limits, leveled the wings, maintained altitude and flown over the buildings on the Manhattan side, board officials said.

They might have faced penalties from the Federal Aviation Administration, but “they’d be alive today to explain why they had to do that,” said Mark V. Rosenker, the chairman of the safety board.

According the air safety board, while they couldn’t tell who was actually operating the controls at the time of the crash, the responsibility was ultimately the owner-operateror, Mr. Lidle. The report cites a number of factors for the crash including where the plane began making it’s turn, in the middle of the river rather than near the Queens side. Also, the wind was blowing out of the East, had they chosen to make the turn from Manhattan to Queens rather than the other way around the turn would have been much easier to pull off.

The plane appeared to have entered the turn at an angle that was almost steep enough to successfully make it, investigators said. From there, it leveled out slightly, then turned more steeply. The two men had completed only about three-quarters of the turn when they reached the Manhattan shore. Their bank angle, leaning back toward Queens, would have partly obscured their view of the approaching Manhattan buildings.

A lawyer representing the Lidle family and the Stanger family are suing Cirrus claiming that the controls of the plane locked up during its turn making it impossible to handle. The board said they found no evidence of this at all.

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