Jammed controls forced Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor into 45 seconds of helpless terror as their plane spun before making a death plunge into a Manhattan building, a lawyer for the ballplayer’s widow, Melanie, said yesterday.
Lidle and his co-pilot pal Tyler Stanger would still be alive today if not for a design flaw in the Cirrus SR-20 plane that carried them above the East River before it crashed into an Upper East Side building in October 2006, the lawyer told jurors in the wrongful-death trial.
Lawyer Todd Macaluso told jurors in his opening statement: “If you can’t control the airplane you can’t be at fault.”
But Cirrus lawyer Patrick Bradley said the pilots attempted a maneuver that was too tricky for the narrow air corridor.