'Miracle' survivor escapes death as plane hits her NYC apartment

A woman fled with her housekeeper from the apartment hit by New York Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle's plane yesterday, followed by flames that scorched her back and legs.

It was just another Wednesday afternoon and Ilana Benhuri was sitting at her computer in her apartment, number 40ABG, in the Belaire building on East 72nd Street in the Upper East Side.

Her husband, Dr Parviz Benhuri, was at work, but her housekeeper was cleaning up in another room.

Unbeknownst to her, an aviation emergency was unfolding outside.

A private aircraft was in trouble, banking erratically from side to side and zig-zagging inland into Manhattan from the narrow corridor that is open to small plane and helicopter traffic over the waters of the East River.

If Ms Benhuri, 50, had looked out she would have had at least a few seconds warning. It was coming right at her.

Then, the shock.

Her plate-glass windows, which gave her a privileged view of the river and Upper Manhattan, exploded with a mighty bang.

All at once, the apartment was transformed into a hell of leaping flames and the screaming of metal against cement.

The still-rotating propeller, part of a wing and the engine of the Cirrus SR20 aircraft skidded across her floor.

Amazingly, she was still alive, with cuts to her neck and back and flames licking her body.

She leapt to her feet and called to Evelyn Reategua, her housekeeper of six years.

The roaring of the initial fire-ball meant the two women couldn't hear each other at first.

"Evelyn, help me! Eveylyn, help me!" the doctor's wife screamed.

"I saw my boss bathed in blood, her face, her neck," Ms Reategua explained a few hours later.

"I grabbed her and said, 'Let's get out of here'. She couldn't hear me, just yelled for me to help."

She went on: "The floor was on fire and looked like it was going to cave in."

Thankfully, that didn't happen and the two women staggered, arms interlocked, down a corridor that was rapidly filling with smoke to the emergency stairwell.

Like other residents and visitors who were in the building at the time, they didn't dare take a lift, even though one was still working - a lucky break that allowed firefighters to ascend quickly and extinguish the fires in several apartments on the 30th and 31st floors.

A few floors above, Luis Gonzalez, 23, was working for a construction crew on renovating an empty apartment.

Unlike Ms Benhuri, he was looking out the window moments before the tragedy and he saw exactly what was coming.

Indeed, he says he even saw the face of the pilot as the plane began bearing down on the Belaire. He thought he and his mates were done for.

"It was coming right at us. The whole building shook and then we ran for the elevator," he said.

Higher still in one of the penthouse flats, another housekeeper, Ann Robert, was ironing her employer's clothes.

Her 21-year-old daughter was there too, watching television.

"I heard a boom and saw smoke and ashes outside the kitchen window," she said, "and then the painter came running in frantically from working in the baby's room." Everyone dashed for the stairs.

"Death was going through my mind," Ms Robert said.

"When I saw the smoke, I did not know if we would make it out alive.

As I was coming down the stairs I thought that the whole building might come down and that me and my daughter might go at the same time.

But once we got past the 30th floor, I said in my mind that maybe we were safe."

Teams of investigators from the FBI and also the National Transport Safety Board, NTSB, were in New York yesterday pouring over radar records to try to determine what happened to the plane, piloted by New York Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle, as it approached the end of the East River corridor.

No easy answers were at hand.

Possibilities include some kind of mechanical malfunction, a U-turn that went wrong perhaps because of a fairly brisk easterly wind at the time, or possibly an emergency maneouvre to avoid a collision that caused a loss of control.

The crash has unleashed a chorus of concern about the casual approach to private aviation around Manhattan.

"The public saw Wednesday that a small aircraft crashing into a high-rise causes far less damage than a jetliner," USA Today newspaper said in an editorial.

"But should a terrorist get hold of a plane and fill it with explosives or a biological weapon, the public also saw how little there is to stop him from flying into such New York icons as the United Nations headquarters and the Statute of Liberty, both of which Lidle flew past."

That debate as well as the investigation into the cause of the crash will doubtless play out over several weeks.

Meanwhile, the residents of Manhattan can now only be thankful that their worst thoughts on Wednesday did not come to pass and begin to resettle their nerves.

Ms Benhuri, meanwhile, remained in hospital last night with burns on 15 per cent of her body but her condition was stable and she will be fine.

"She's in shock," her husband said, but he added: "She's lucky she made it. It's a miracle."

It is a bad dream anyone who lives in a high-rise tower in Manhattan has probably had at least once in the years since 11 September 2001.

- INDEPENDENT