Entertainment

When a B-25 crashed into the Empire State Building

Seventy years ago Tuesday, an Army B-25 bomber struck the 78th and 79th floors of the Empire State Building, killing 14 people. Remarkable footage shot after the crash is among half a million British Movietone News reels recently posted to YouTube.

Two weeks before World War II ended with Japan’s surrender, the bomber was headed from Bedford, Mass., to Newark Airport. Ignoring orders to land at LaGuardia because of extremely heavy fog, the pilot was flying much lower than the required minimum of 2,000 feet over Manhattan.

The bomber crashed into the north side of the 34th Street landmark just 913 feet above the street. One of the plane’s engines plowed through seven walls before emerging on the south side and exploding on the roof of a neighboring 12-story building.





Other debris from the demolished bomber severed elevator cables, sending two cars with passengers inside plummeting 80 stories to a sub-basement.

The pilot, Lt. Col. William F. Smith Jr., was killed, along with two other people aboard the plane. Eleven people working in the building died, mostly employees of the National Catholic Welfare Council on the 79th floor. One body was discovered on the 72nd-floor parapet. At least two dozen people were injured.

The casualties would have been much higher if the crash hadn’t taken place on a Saturday morning. The Empire State Building reopened for business just two days later, and even more remarkably, it took just three months to repair all the damage.





By comparison, when planes piloted by terrorists struck the old World Trade Center towers in 2001, both buildings collapsed within 90 minutes due to significant structural differences between what were New York’s tallest structures.

That’s partly because the WTC towers, unlike the Empire State Building, did not have internal supporting columns to absorb the impact like the Empire State.

Investigators found that huge quantities of burning jet fuel caused the exterior walls bearing the weight of the towers to melt and collapse, with their weight forcing all the floors below to also collapse. More than 2,750 persons, including all the passengers on the two planes, were killed in the weekday attack.

Here’s how British Movietone’s main competitor — British Pathé — covered the Empire State plane crash, with much of the same footage:





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