Sports Ticker
10/12/2006 2:06:39 AM
NEW YORK (Ticker) - New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle died in a plane crash in Manhattan on Wednesday. He was 34.
Lidle and a flight instructor perished in the crash of a small plane into an apartment building on the upper East Side. The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that the plane was registered to Lidle.
Earlier on Tuesday, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg confirmed that two people were aboard the small plane, a Cirrus SR20 or SR22, and that both had died.
Bloomberg said that two people on a small plane that seats four people took off from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, about 15 miles from Manhattan, at 2:29 p.m EDT.
It circled the Statue of Liberty on an apparent sightseeing excursion and came up the East River. Radar lost contact with the plane approximately around the 59th Street Bridge and the plane was heading north before it crashed into the 30th and 31st floors of a building on 72nd Street at about 2:42 p.m.
The two bodies were found on a sidewalk on the street below the building. The engine was found in an apartment, but the rest of the plane was on the ground.
According to the NTSB, Lidle was granted a private pilots license in February and purchased the plane in June.
"He loved to fly. He didn't hide that. He loved to learn about how the airplanes worked," said his twin brother Kevin Lidle, a former minor league catcher.
Bloomberg added that nobody in the apartment building was injured and that the fire was put out. Eleven firefighters were taken to hospitals with minor injuries.
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