I was 9, airplane-crazy and immersed in the final days of World War II, which by then had gripped my attention for three years. I could spot not just P-51s but Fairey Fulmars and Brewster Buffalos, and I knew the difference between Kittyhawks and Warhawks, just as my schoolmates could recognize Ford and Mercury grilles.
On a foggy July Saturday morning during that youthful summer, one of the great aviation catastrophes of the era happened just 40 miles south of where I lived, and I remember it not as though it was yesterday, but clearly enough. A B-25D— medium bomber, two Wright R-2600 engines, made by North American, nicknamed Mitchell, the B model flew the Doolittle Raid on my 6th birthday, I’d have quickly told you—plowed straight into the north face of what was then the tallest skyscraper in the world, New York City’s art deco classic, the Empire State Building.
Fourteen people died, a million dollars of damage was done to the building, a perfectly good bomber was totaled and an even worse catastrophe was averted only because it was a weekend. The sole cause was pilot error—overconfidence compounded by arrogance. The B-25’s pilot, Lt. Col. William F. Smith Jr., had flown B-17s in the ETO, obviously a brave and competent heavy bomber pilot. He was a handsome West Pointer and an All-American lacrosse jock, a bomber squadron CO and then a decorated deputy group commander and lieutenant colonel by the time he was 27—one of the youngest in the entire Army Air Forces. He was accustomed to being in command, in control. Smith “had a jaunty and devil-may-care attitude,” one Army Air Forces memorial site reminisced after the disaster.
Now he was back in the States, where air traffic control was still primitive. Airline traffic filed instrument flight plans and flew appointed routes, maintaining separation by frequent radio contact with controllers, since there was no ATC radar. Military traffic, however, had priority and operated pretty much at will.
Smith was stationed in Sioux Falls, S.D., and he and his commanding officer, Colonel Harris Rogner, had flown the B-25 east two days earlier. Smith dropped his boss off at Newark Airport, just across the Hudson River from New York City, and then continued on to Boston for a short visit with his wife, landing at Hanscom Field, the USAAF base 20 miles northwest of the city. It was the first time he had flown a B-25 from the left seat.
Early that Saturday morning, July 28, 1945, he preflighted the Mitchell and checked the weather. Most of coastal New England down to New Jersey was blanketed by a 1,200- to 1,500-foot overcast with intermittent rain and fog, forecast to improve slightly. No problem for Smith; after all, what was a little weather to somebody who’d flown through plenty of it on his way to Germany and back? “An English day if I ever saw one,” he said to his wife.
But there was a problem. Boston Control wouldn’t approve Smith’s Hanscom-to-Newark-direct with an 0830 takeoff time, because Newark was expecting too much IFR airline traffic that morning to make room for a military itinerant. Smith would have to wait until 1100 to depart for Newark.
No way. Colonel Rogner expected Smith by 1000, and bird colonels don’t wait. Smith had an idea. He’d declare New York City’s LaGuardia Airport as his destination, which would permit an 0830 departure. When he got over LGA, he’d simply divert to EWR. His “aircraft clearance”—a military document, not a civil flight plan—showed that he’d be going direct to LaGuardia, with Stewart Army Airfield, 55 miles north, as his alternate. The box showing that his flight would be IFR remained unchecked. (Smith’s aircraft clearance form also showed that he held a “white” military instrument rating. White cards denoted a basic instrument rating, for use only on military missions; only green cards were equivalent to civilian instrument ratings.)
Smith was only allowed to use LaGuardia as a destination if he had official military business at the airport. He lied and declared to the dispatcher at Hanscom that he in fact did. “I have official business with the 1338th BU [base unit] at LG. I am familiar with the danger areas in my line of flight,” his aircraft clearance form declared. His “familiarity” largely dated back to his days up the Hudson River, as a student at West Point.
Smith had two passengers. One was a USAAF staff sergeant, a C-47 crew chief, and the other a Navy aviation machinist’s mate hitching a ride. The Navy guy was in a jump seat behind the cockpit, the staff sergeant in the copilot’s seat, but largely as a sightseer. Smith was single-piloting an airplane normally flown by a cockpit crew of two plus a radio operator and a navigator. He was flying a big, fast, complex piston twin, reading a chart and working the radios. No big deal for anybody who has flown a Cessna or Piper twin IFR, but a B-25 was eight times as heavy and far more complex than a modern light twin with digital avionics.
The weather deteriorated rather than improved. At 0945, Smith, after following the Connecticut and then the Long Island shore line at altitudes measured in hundreds rather than thousands of feet, showed up at LaGuardia out of what might as well have been nowhere, to the bafflement of a tower controller who was trying to deal with seven stacked-up airliners waiting to land, two holding short for departure and a Navy airplane that had lost radio contact, all of them IFR. Now he had an Army bomber orbiting the field at something less than pattern altitude. This mattered little to Smith, who demanded the Newark weather. In 1945 military pilots often considered civilian air traffic controllers little more than a nuisance.
LaGuardia said EWR was IFR and recommended that Smith land immediately. In fact, they very much wanted him to land immediately so they could throw the book at him, for violating a number of rules in that book. LaGuardia tower phoned the Army Flight Service Center, in charge of military traffic, and asked that they order Smith down. The Army declined.
From the tower cab, the controller had a good view of Manhattan, and he said, “At this time, we’re unable to see the top of the Empire State Building.” The Empire State was 1,250 feet high to the top of its occupied floors, 1,454 to the tip of the radio mast above that. Within minutes, Smith’s B-25 would center-punch it 975 feet above the streets. Smith transmitted, “Roger, Tower, thank you very much, we’ll continue to Newark.”
Smith was in and out of the clouds and planned to get to Newark by what pilots call scud-running: fly under the weather so you can stay in contact with the ground, maneuver visually and hope there continues to be enough space between ground and overcast to allow that. Most pilots have survived the occasional stupid scud run. Smith, of course, didn’t.
The sound of two 14-cylinder, 1,700-hp radials suddenly rattled Midtown Manhattan as Smith broke out of the overcast westbound above the East Side roughly in line with 42nd Street. He was literally within the canyons of buildings, and one USAAF officer in a room on the 22nd floor of the Biltmore Hotel, on 43rd Street, saw the B-25 thunder past below him. Others in office buildings saw a wing tip whip past mere feet from their windows. Smith was in and out of the overcast, trying to climb while missing buildings.
For some reason, Smith had approached Manhattan assuming he was already well over the relatively unobstructed ground of New Jersey, and he had put the gear down in preparation for landing at Newark. As he turned south down Fifth Avenue eight blocks north of the Empire State Building, the wheels were slowly coming back up, but their added drag kept the B-25’s rate of climb agonizingly low. Smith had climbed far enough that now he was in the clouds, so the skyscraper appeared in his windscreen in a microsecond. He would have had no time to even utter the obscenity that is so often the last word heard on a modern cockpit voice recorder.
The B-25 plowed into the 79th floor of the 103-story building. Both engines separated at impact and flew straight and true, one of them entirely through the building and out the other side. Smith and his two passengers died instantly. Eleven people inside the Empire State Building were slightly slower to go, incinerated by the Mitchell’s gasoline.
Conspiracy theorists have inevitably compared the B-25 crash to the 9/11 disaster and concluded that because the Empire State remained standing and was repaired within three weeks, it proves that the collapse of the World Trade Center was caused not by airplanes hitting the buildings but by pre-positioned explosive charges. Their theorizing is witless and naive.
The Empire State is a stone-and-mortar building with enormously strong and heavy outer walls. When the B-25 hit the masonry structure, it stopped dead (other than the torn-loose engines). The bomber made a two-story-high hole, but that’s as far as its airframe went. Some of it rained down on the streets and avenues below, some of it remained sticking out of the building, having decelerated from roughly 200 mph to exactly zero in mere feet. Much of the 900 gallons of avgas still in the Mitchell’s tanks cascaded down the building’s outer walls, though certainly enough gas did get inside the 78th and 79th floor offices to kill and maim.
World War II fighter and bomber pilots considered transport pilots, especially civilian pilots with all their procedures and rules, to be “feather merchants”—people who had comfy jobs and couldn’t pull their weight. Their puerile rules didn’t apply to an ace of the base like Bill Smith, who flew in a separate world from the tradesmen. It wasn’t Smith’s doing, but the B-25 he flew bore cynical nose art, applied in Sioux Falls after its guns had been removed and its interior stripped to accommodate VIP seating. In bright crimson paint, the not-a-bomber was dubbed Old John Feather Merchant.
Less than a year after Smith’s B-25 lacerated the Empire State Building, an Army Air Forces Twin Beech, a C-45F Expediter, crashed into a Manhattan skyscraper at 40 Wall Street. The Beechcraft was also en route to Newark and flying through low clouds. Its five occupants all died, and the USAAF finally decreed that returning military pilots flying in domestic airspace would have to undergo serious retraining before being allowed to operate amid the feather merchants.
Stephan Wilkinson took his first flying lessons in the Civil Air Patrol at age 14, five years after the Empire State tragedy. He recommends for further reading The Sky Is Falling, by Arthur Weingarten.
Originally published in the September 2014 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.
