Yankees Pitcher flies plane into building

Cory Lidle, a pitcher for the New York Yankees, died yesterday in a plane crash. Shortly after Lidle issued a distress call from his private, 4 seat jet, he crashed into a Manhattan residential apartment building. Lidle ,who just recently purchased his private jet in September, was mocking safety concerns of flying an aircraft by himself. According to People,

During an interview with the paper, the baseball player brushed off safety concerns about his new hobby. “The whole plane has a parachute on it,” Lidle said. “Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you’re up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly.”

I guess he was part of the small percentage of pilots that have engine failure and fly a plane into a building. Although this is a tragedy, what did he expect? He completely down played the dangers of flying an airplane. This leads me to a similar situation that occurred on July 4th with a friend of mine. He proceeded to tell me, “Hey if you explode a thunderbomb in your hand it wont hurt, only if you close your hands.” He proceeded to explode the pack of thunderbombs in his hand, one of which jumped up and hit him in the eye. He was in the hospital that evening and the moral of the story is, don’t explode things in your hands.