July 28
On this day 70 years ago, at about 9:50 on a foggy Saturday morning, a B-25 bomber piloted by Lieutenant Col. William F. Smith crashed into the 78th and 79th floors of the Empire State Building at a speed of approximately 200 miles per hour. Fourteen people were killed, including all three aboard the plane, while 26 more were injured.
A decorated Air Force pilot who had flown the much larger B-17 in over 30 overseas bombing campaigns, Lt. Col. Smith had been tasked that day with the far more mundane mission of ferrying servicemen from Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts to Newark, New Jersey. Encountering low visibility as he entered New York, Smith contacted the control tower at what is now LaGuardia and requested to land there instead. The tower advised him to continue on to Newark, as the fog was too thick for a safe landing. (Here, my sources conflict; some say LaGuardia advised him to land there and not Newark.)
Regardless of whether Smith was ignoring the tower’s instruction or heeding it, he soon found himself flying among New York’s skyscrapers at an altitude of only 500 feet. The bomber narrowly averted collisions with several buildings, including 30 Rockefeller Center, but Smith’s maneuvering ultimately wasn’t enough to avoid catastrophe. Large portions of the two floors hit were immediately engulfed in flames upon impact; several employees in the Catholic War Relief offices were incinerated almost instantly.
Both engines dislodged from the plane, one going all the way through the building and landing in a nearby sculptor’s studio. The other severed an elevator cable, sending that car plunging to the ground with two young women inside. Incredibly, though one was badly hurt, both survived, thanks to the elevator’s emergency brakes and the cushioning provided by both the severed cables below and the air compression caused by the car’s rapid fall.
Many other incredible tales of survival and heroism prevailed amidst the tragedy. The disaster was also constrained by several strokes of good fortune: the accident didn’t happen during a weekday, when about ten times as many people would have been in the building; the 78th floor was largely unoccupied, used mostly for storage and maintenance; the plane had been stripped of much of its artillery and required little fuel for its light cargo; and unlike most modern skyscrapers, the buildings’ steel beams were insulated against excessive heat by thick concrete and limestone. As the damage was limited to the two floors, the building was back open for business on Monday while repairs were underway.
Several months later, the Federal Tort Claims Act was passed after lingering in Congress for over two decades; for the very first time, the doctrine of ‘sovereign immunity’ was restricted and U.S. citizens were granted the right to sue their own government. The law was applied retroactively to families of the victims, and many indeed took advantage of the opportunity.
Sources: Wikipedia entries for B-25 Empire State Building crash and Federal Tort Claims Act; 2008 NPR story; 1995 New York Times article; nycaviation.com article; aerospaceweb.org article
