The Cory Lidle Crash: One Fact, Two ExplanationsMaking a 180-degree turn to get out of a "box canyon"—a literal one, in the mountains, or an airspace one, like the situation at the top of the East River—is harder than you might think. The best way to imagine an airplane's performance is to think of a bicycle. Like a bicycle, an airplane has to keep moving in order to stay up. If a bike goes too slowly, it falls over. If an airplane goes too slowly, it falls out of the sky. For airplanes the phenomenon is called "stalling," and it refers not to engine performance but to the fact that the air is not going over the wings quickly enough to provide lift for the plane. But as with a bike, the faster an airplane goes, the more space it needs to complete a U-turn. A bicyclist who is roaring down a hill toward a hairpin curve needs to calculate just how fast he can go to make the turn. Something similar happens with an airplane nearing a forced 180-degree turn, like the one on the East River. The pilot has to figure out the combination of air speed (slower the better, but not slow enough to risk a stall), bank angle (steeper the better—except that at a steeper angle the risk of stalling increases), use of flaps, allowable loss of altitude, and so on to create the so-called "minimum radius turn." The second most uncomfortable moment I have had while flying was in the Cascades mountain range, near the town of Concrete, Washington. The weather was perfect, the scenery was beautiful, but the walls of the valley containing Concrete were getting closer together than I liked. I had recently trained in the "minimum radius turn" and I made one to get out of the valley—flying over toward one edge to gain maximum turning room, reducing the speed, using the flaps, banking for the turn. In reality, it was not a close call at all—I probably had two miles to spare on either side—but it felt much closer than I would have wanted. The turning space at the top of the East River appears to have been much narrower, and a there was a stiff wind from the east. This would have pushed a plane, as it made its U-turn, toward the opposite "canyon wall," in this case the apartments on the Upper East Side. We don't know what happened to Cory Lidle and his CFI, whose experience was mainly in California. But we know that this kind of situation can be difficult. (My first most uncomfortable moment? When taking off from a short grass airfield, in Vermont, that had trees at one end—on the day after a heavy overnight rain. I had flown out of the field the day before and cleared the trees by hundreds of feet. The grass, when wet, became an entirely different surface, and I cleared the tree tips by much less than was comfortable. Moral to me: never again a grass strip if there is any kind of obstacle anywhere in sight.) Here is the other explanation: why Cory Lidle could have said, in the quote now replayed with such bitter irony, that flying was "safe." I think this is what he meant: In normal circumstances—clear weather, no obstacles, traveling point to point—flying seems and to a large extent is fundamentally safe. The big engines are amazingly reliable. On the rare occasions when they fail, you're taught how to glide the plane in for a landing—or use a parachute, with the Cirrus. There is no traffic whizzing by you six feet away, as on a busy road. The airplane "wants to fly"—it is designed to be stable and stay aloft. Once you learn to land a plane, much like learning to ride a bike, it's a relatively easy and natural process. Landing is the one part of flying an airplane that requires coordination and reflexes like those called on constantly when driving a car. Flying requires awareness of a lot of things at once—weather, navigation, terrain, how the airplane is performing, what are the next three things you have to do. But usually it's not as instantaneously demanding as driving is. If you fail to pay attention for a few seconds in a car, you can die. That is very rarely the case in airplanes—for instance, the last phases of an instrument landing under bad weather conditions. In a car you can very easily die through absolutely no fault of your own, as when a drunk driver runs a red light. That is also rare in aviation. For better or worse, most of what happens is your own doing. That is what he meant, though it's all very sad now. James Fallows is a national correspondent at The Atlantic.
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