Chicago Sun-Times : It wasn't terrorism, so we return to our regularly scheduled lives

It wasn't terrorism, so we return to our regularly scheduled lives

by RICHARD ROEPER | Sun-Times Columnist | October 12, 2006

''There are a lot more dangerous things than flying a plane. If something happens up there, you can glide for 20 minutes." --Cory Lidle in February 2006 after obtaining his pilot's license.

At first it sounded like the set-up for a sick joke. New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle was the pilot of the plane that crashed into a New York City high-rise? OK, what's the punch line?

But it was not one of those twisted "disaster" jokes that we often hear in the immediate aftermath of a tragedy. Some 27 years after Yankee great Thurman Munson was killed in Ohio while practicing takeoffs and landings in his Cessna, Yanks pitcher Cory Lidle was the registered pilot of the small aircraft that crashed into a Manhattan skyscraper (to this day, Munson's Yankee locker remains empty as a tribute.)

Lidle's passport was reportedly found near the crash. Imagine being the individual who found the passport and maybe recognized the name and photo. How bizarre is that?

Just two days ago, Lidle had called in to WFAN radio and had engaged in a "tense, bizarre" conversation with the hosts, according to an article Tuesday in Newsday. He had been getting ripped on talk radio. Many Yankees fans were outraged because Lidle had been quoted as saying the Tigers seemed more prepared than the Yanks for their recent playoff series. A number of pundits were saying the recently acquired Lidle should move on to another team in 2007.

All of that stuff seems so small now.

Suddenly chilling words

Last month the New York Times did a feature piece about Lidle's passion for flying.

At the time, it was a standard, well-done feature. Now it seems chilling.

"When the Yankees fly, the pilots are not only in the cockpit," wrote Tyler Kepner. "There is another pilot in the main cabin, where the players sit. He is probably studying his hand-held Global Positioning System receiver, tracking the weather and noting the plane's precise speed and altitude.

"He is Cory Lidle, who has been a major league pitcher for nine years and a pilot for seven months. He earned his pilot's license last off-season and bought a four-seat airplane for $187,000. It is a Cirrus SR20..."

Regarding concerns about the safety of his hobby, Lidle said, "The whole plane has a parachute on it. Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you're up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly."

Lidle's instructor, Tyler Stanger, told the Times that Lidle kept his cool in simulated emergency situations.

"Most people get kind of ruffled. He was like, 'OK, no big deal.' A lot of it is his mental state.... If you're in an emergency, you can't waste any time worrying. You have to take command of the situation. A lot of people I fly with don't have that mentality. Cory does."

No indication of terrorist activity

Before the shocking news about Lidle surfaced Wednesday afternoon, the obligatory issue was popping up every 30 seconds on the cable news programs. If you heard it once, you heard it a hundred times:

"There's no indication this was an act of terrorism."

"Nothing has been ruled out, but all indications are that this was an accident."

Even before CNN and Fox News and MSNBC could agree on whether it was a helicopter or a fixed-wing aircraft that crashed into a high-rise in New York City, even as NORAD was scrambling fighter aircrafts to major U.S. cities as a precautionary measure, even as we were getting conflicting reports on when the building was evacuated, the news anchors and the officials they were interviewing kept stressing there was no reason to believe this was anything other than a terrible accident. ("No word if 'terrorists' or 'tourists' are to blame, because both sound the same when Bush says them," was the wisecrack headline on Fark.com.)

For more than five years now, we've been holding our breath, wondering when terrorists would strike in New York City, or Chicago, or Washington, D.C, or Disney World, or God knows where.

How many false alarms have there been in airport terminals, on planes, in high-rises? How many times have we heard about a plane crash or a fire or an explosion -- only to receive quick reassurances this was "only" a run-of-the-mill tragedy? If it's a freakish plane crash or a factory explosion or a crazed loner gunman, we shake our heads and say, "What a shame," but we forge ahead with our day. If it turns out to be something more than that -- and one day, it will turn out to be something else -- immediate local concerns like the gubernatorial race and the weather and the Bears will suddenly seem trivial.

"Ebert & Roeper" airs after the late news on Saturday and at 10:30 a.m. Sunday on WLS-Channel 7.