By DEEPTI HAJELA
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Investigators and workers in hard hats gathered up the scorched pieces of Cory Lidle’s plane Thursday as they looked for clues to why the aircraft crashed into a luxury Manhattan high-rise, killing the New York Yankees pitcher and his flight instructor.
Crews recovered the nose, wings, tail, instrument panel of the plane along with a hand-held GPS device as they conducted an exhaustive, floor-by-floor sweep of the building - even inspecting terraces and ledges, 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 white pickup truck as neighborhood kids gathered to gawk at the jagged and twisted metal, glass shards, charred parts.
Authorities also shed new light on the final moments of the ill-fated flight. Hersman said the plane was losing altitude and was last seen on radar at 500 feet - moments before plunging into the building.
Residents began returning to their battered and scarred apartments, one day after Lidle’s plane slammed into the building and sent pieces of fiery wreckage raining down on the street and sidewalk. One witness described a terrifying scene of looking at the charred body of one of the pilots lying in the street.
“It was in a fetal position, strapped into a seat. I could see a white leg sticking up. It was awful,” said maintenance worker Juan Rosario, adding that other plane wreckage, including a door and wheels, was strewn near the body.
The medical examiner’s office removed the bodies Wednesday.
More details also emerged about the flight instructor who was with Lidle when the four-seat Cirrus SR20 hit the apartment towers during a flight around Manhattan. Tyler Stanger, 26, operated a flight school in La Verne, Calif., and lived with his wife and young child in California.
He and Lidle apparently planned on flying from New York to California this week.
“They were going to fly back together. It was right after the loss to Detroit,” said Dave Conriguez, who works at the 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 the airspace around Manhattan to ensure planes won’t be able to get so close to the city’s many towering buildings. Much of the airspace over two of the main rivers that encircle Manhattan is unrestricted for small aircraft flying under 1,100 feet.
The flight began at a suburban New Jersey airport at about 2:20 p.m. Lidle and Stanger flew south along the Hudson River and looped around the Statue of Liberty before heading north up the East River.
Hersman said the plane was cruising at 112 mph at 700 feet of altitude as it tried to make a U-turn. It was last seen on radar about a quarter-mile north of the building, in the middle of the turn, at 500 feet, she said.
“Early examination indicates that the propellers were turning” at the time of impact, she said, indicating that the engine was running.
The Federal Aviation Administration issued a temporary restriction requiring all general aviation aircraft flying below 1,500 feet near the city to be authorized by air traffic control. That restriction was lifted Thursday.
A day after the crash, there were signs of both normalcy and devastation in the neighborhood.
About five cars, including a yellow cab, were crushed or seriously damaged by the falling debris. A police mobile command center and a white truck marked “Crime Scene Unit” were parked in the frozen zone. The building’s facade had a gaping hole where bricks and glass used to be. In another area, a six-story smoke-smudge marred the red brick.
Lillian Snower Beacham, 52, said her 36th-floor apartment smelled of heavy smoke, and shattered glass and other debris covered her windowsills. Beacham saw the plane hit her building four floors above her, then watched pieces of the plane fall to the ground. Her first thoughts were of terrorism.
“That’s why I took nothing and ran,” said Beacham. “It’s just surreal, absolutely surreal. The images of 9/11 come straight at you. You just run.”
Lidle, who was 34 and had a wife and 6-year-old boy, recently obtained his pilot’s license and viewed flying as an escape from the stress of professional baseball and a way to see the world in a different light.
It was not clear who was at the controls - Lidle or Stanger.
Hersman said that as of September, there were 545 SR20S registered the United States. Since 2001, the NTSB has investigated 18 accidents involving the plane; those crashes resulted in 14 deaths.