US News

DESIGNER BRO IN AIR TRAGEDY

Renowned fashion designer Mary McFadden’s financier brother was killed in a plane wreck in Texas this week – in the same-model aircraft Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashed near her Manhattan apartment.

The small plane carrying Upper East Side socialite George McFadden, 67, plummeted nose-first Tuesday afternoon into a lake in Sabine County, not far from Texas’ border with Louisiana. The single-engine Cirrus SR22, which had departed Tupelo, Miss., was en route to an airport near Houston.

Two other people were also killed in the crash – the plane’s pilot, father of four Daniel McIntire, 54; and Heather Hardin, 35. The dead woman’s stepsister said Hardin, who was single, had worked for McIntire at a Mississippi accounting consulting company, and speculated that McFadden had been one of their clients.

“It was pretty much a shock to all of us. We knew she was going to Houston, but were not expecting this,” said Christy Renard, Hardin’s stepsister. “She’s going to be greatly missed.”

Authorities were still searching for the three bodies yesterday, and were talking about sending divers into the Toledo Bend Reservoir as part of their recovery effort. The National Transportation Safety Board is probing what caused the plane to sputter and fall through the clouds to the water.

Mary McFadden, 69, was “shocked and distraught” at the news, the designer’s friend, Gregory Speck, told The Post. “They were very close.”

Speck said McFadden told him that her brother – a general partner in McFadden Brothers investment firm who has several children – had been traveling on business related to an oil company in Texas.

The designer and George McFadden’s widow, Carol, 52, ran into Carol’s East 90th Street penthouse apartment yesterday afternoon past a Post reporter without making any comment. Speck said Mary McFadden was making funeral arrangements for her brother.

An American fashion icon for decades, McFadden is a former president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. She lives on East 72nd Street in Manhattan.

In October 2006, a Cirrus SR22 carrying Yankees pitcher Lidle and flight instructor Tyler Stanger crashed into the upper floors of the Belaire Apartments, killing them instantly and injuring nearly two dozen other people in the fire that broke out as a result.

The Belaire apartments are directly across from Mary’s home.

George and Carol McFadden last month sold their mansion on Lake Agawam in Southampton for $25 million. In 2005, Carol McFadden bought the family’s current penthouse on East 90th Street for $7.8 million. In 1999, the couple sold an East 92nd Street townhouse Woody Allen for $17.9 million.

Additional reporting by Peter Cox

samuel.goldsmith@nypost.com