WW2 incident

[Harvey M. Taylor]

Anyone remember the bomber in WW2 that ran into the Empire State bldg.? It was foggy and the pilot was disoriented and ran into it with almost very little damage. I bet Wally remembers it.
Max

[Bruce Page]

I thought this was going to be about table saw blades.
WW2 "The Big One" was before my time (barely). I do remember reading about the bomber.

[Chuck Wintle]

Anyone remember the bomber in WW2 that ran into the Empire State bldg.? It was foggy and the pilot was disoriented and ran into it with almost very little damage. I bet Wally remembers it.
Max

My only knowledge of this incident is what I read in wikipedia.

[Curt Harms]

Anyone remember the bomber in WW2 that ran into the Empire State bldg.? It was foggy and the pilot was disoriented and ran into it with almost very little damage. I bet Wally remembers it.
Max

B25,read about it. I think that led to charted instrument departures. That was my first thought when I heard that a plane ran into the world trade center ...... except there was not a cloud in the sky that day...........

[Steve Schlumpf]

Max - I remember reading about this many years ago but I don't recall ever hearing the name of the plane! Took a while but here are two links that say the bomber's name was ""Old John Feather Merchant".

AeroSpace Web
Fear of Landing

[Steve Rozmiarek]

Google finds all the info you'd ever want. Careful, some is kind of gory. First I'd heard of it was when my my grandmother, a Captain who served on the hospital ships in the european theater during the war, mentioned it after 9/11.

[Mel Fulks]

Just a little before my time,but growing up that building was a big topic of conversation with endless speculation on what
damage a penny dropped from it would do from its stratospheric height . And there would be anniversary photos
of the plane stuck in the building in all the papers. Another wild incident with the building was the attempt to moor a
dirigible to the spire. Passengers would have then climbed down a rope ladder. Sadly,they decided it was not practical.

[Michael Weber]

Unbelievably, I am friends with a man whose mother was operating an elevator in the building at the time the plane hit. The elevator not only caught on fire but fell many floors. The lady was badly burned and all the bones in her legs and hips were broken plus internal organ damage. By a miracle she not only survived but recovered and had two children starting just a couple of years later. She just passed away only a few years ago.
copied this from Wikepedia about it. Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver was injured. Rescuers decided to transport her on an elevator that they did not know had weakened cables. She survived a plunge of 75 stories, which still stands as the Guinness World Record for the longest survived elevator fall.^[7]

[Mike Henderson]

I remember reading an article about it in Reader's Digest when I was a kid. I was able to answer a Trivial Pursuit question about it years later -"What happened on the 79th floor of the Empire State building on [some date - don't remember]". A guy I was playing the game with said to me, "I know you won't be able to answer this one" but I did.

Mike