A bomber lost in fog tears into the Empire State Building; fourteen dead
On a foggy Saturday morning in July 1945, Lieutenant Colonel William Franklin Smith Jr. was flying a B-25 Mitchell bomber toward LaGuardia. Diverted and disoriented, he banked past the Chrysler Building, then turned the wrong way and struck the Empire State Building's north face between the 79th and 80th floors at 9:40 a.m. Fourteen people died: three crewmen and eleven civilians. One engine tore clean through the tower to land on a roof a block away. The building's frame held, and offices below reopened for business the following Monday.
Before the crash, citizens injured by government negligence had almost no way to sue. Congress answered with the Federal Tort Claims Act, signed by President Truman in August 1946, opening the government to lawsuits retroactively. The disaster also led the Civil Aeronautics Administration to set a hard 2,500-foot floor on flight altitude over Manhattan.
QHow far did Betty Lou Oliver fall, and how did she survive it?
The elevator operator was on the 80th floor when the crash severed her car's cables with falling wreckage. She dropped 75 stories, all the way to the basement. She lived because the car itself, plunging down the shaft with her inside, compressed the air beneath it into a cushion that slowed the final impact. It remains one of the longest elevator falls ever survived.
QWhat happened to the engine that didn't stay in the building?
One of the B-25's two engines punched clean through the south side of the Empire State Building and kept going, flying a full block through the air before landing on the roof of a neighboring building. It started a fire there that burned through a penthouse art studio. The other engine took the opposite path, falling downward into an elevator shaft instead of outward into the sky.
QWho ended up owning the damaged floor after the crash?
Armand Hammer bought the wrecked 79th floor once repairs were underway and refit it as headquarters for United Distillers of America. The same floor that had taken part of the impact became a corporate address again in short order, in a building that had been left with an 18-by-20-foot hole only months before.
