User talk:Chavaani

DEATH OF Cory Lidle

In an incident that evoked memories of 9/11, a small aircraft crashed into a residential building on Manhattan's Upper East Side in New York late on Wednesday afternoon. There were two confirmed casualties.

The aircraft, that reportedly took off at 2:30 pm from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, crashed into the 50-story Belaire Condominium on East 72nd Street and York Avenue.

CNN reports the owner of the plane was Cory Lidle, a baseball pitcher in the famous New York Yankees.

Thick black smoke, and later fire, could be seen pouring out of the building, and had spread to the floor below the one hit. As many as 168 firefighters were on the scene, reports said.

The Federal Aviation Administration said in a telephone news conference that the crash was caused by a small fixed-wing aircraft that was flying "under visual flight rules" in the East River corridor.

The FAA spokesperson, Diane Spitaliere, cautioned however that only a preliminary probe had been carried out.

Pravin Nair, a research fellow at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, one of the buildings near the crash site, said around 3 pm, a colleague came in and told him about the crash. From his lab, he could see the smoke and hear the fire alarms. "Lots of helicopters are hovering overhead," he said.

A CNN report quoted a North American Aerospace Defense Command spokesperson as saying that it had not been tracking the plane. It also added that as a precautionary measure, combat aircraft had been positioned over several key buildings in US cities.

"The street was filled with black smoke from street level to the sky, which of course reminded me of five years ago," Rich Behar, an eyewitness, told Fox News. "The building's burning on top, there was chaos on the street."

The streets below were jammed with police and emergency aid vehicles. Reports said two squads of the FBI-New York Police Department Joint Terrorism Task Force had reached the spot. The FBI said there was no indication of terrorism.