At 7:30 a.m. on Thursday, October 12, 2006, I steered my parents’ Subaru Outback into the parking garage beneath the Belaire building on 71st Street in New York City, right by the East River. The traffic was bad, with police blockades still in effect and looky-loos and camera crews still clogging the sidewalks. But we braved it because my father was having knee replacement surgery that morning at the Hospital for Special Surgery – a building attached to the Belaire – whose normal routine had been traumatically interrupted just the afternoon before, when a Cirrus SR-20 piloted by Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle plowed into the Belaire’s 30th floor.
Depending on how you look at it, it was either a very bad or very good place for a pilot and aviation editor to be. Over the next few days, I found myself giving innumerable tutorials to shaken patients, hospital staff and other New York residents on general aviation, VFR flight rules, flight plans and the general risk that small airplanes pose to the public at large.
