Wednesday, October 11, 2006

 

Rare Sports Post

Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle flew his private airplane into the side of a Manhattan high rise at 72nd on the east side. If the engine, avionics and fuel were OK, and he wasn't showing off for a girl, you well might conclude that he took the team's early elimination by the usually horrible Tigers way too hard.

Comments:
That crossed my mind but then I decided no way. Did he give it up in a crucial loss?
 
No word yet on cause of crash but he was flying w/ a flight instructor; he was married; and had a 6 year old daughter.

His wife and daughter were flying to the family home CA @ the time of the crash.

Pilot error or mechanical failure but not suicide.

"In the midst of life..."
 
It might be pilot error abetted by mechanical failure, but there was definitely pilot error. Otherwise a fixed-wing light aircraft wouldn't have been anywhere near a 50-story building. (The glide ratio of most light aircraft is in the vicinity of 20:1 -- 20 feet forward for every one foot down. From 1000 feet above ground (which is much too low to be flying over Manhattan, though I don't know what the regs are there), that would be about 4 miles of gliding, even with a completely dead engine.

My strong suspicion is that this low-time pilot made some particularly bad choices and then found out the hard way why they were bad. He didn't know what he didn't know, and he paid a high price.
 
The suicide line is looking ever more unlikely.
 
Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?