Apparently he was making a steep turn at about 700ft ASL, which is very low for steep turns aswell, unfortunately they left themselves no room for error, be that by stalling in a steep turn or by being blown wide by the wind - I saw a video about it, reconstructed by crash investigators in a sim (FS9 if I remember correctly), although I thought about posting a link (in the interest of aviation), I felt that it might not be appreciated by all of us.

Cheers,

TSC.

The plane wasn't "pushed aside"... they were just not far enough towards the other side of the river to make a 180 safely in that wind without banking continuously at about 54 degrees. Supposedly witnesses saw that the initial angle of bank was not that high, and although they banked more as they got close to the building, it was too late.

The VFR exclusion extended from one bank of the river to the other, but before they turned, they were cruising almost straigtht up the middle. Would've been better off doglegging to the east to the very edge of the Class B first before turning around...

The altitude of a steep turn makes no difference whatsoever, except to the extent that if you screw up and stall in the turn, having enough altitude to recover would be helpful.
But they didn't stall... they just cut the turn too close to an obstruction and struck it.

Quote:


Roger...

True, they could have gone a little higher and still been legal, and with a little more thought, being right in the middle and knowing the wind was out of the east at better than 10 knots, they'd have made a decent 180 to the right... might even have kept it inside the exclusion with that wind. Not that it really would matter- I'd rather deal with having busted the airspace than flying into a building!
But one of the problems with that corridor was that they were (loosely) following the unwritten protocol that northbound flights travel on the east side, then turn to the left to go south on the west side. This is also the case over the Hudson, but it works much better there, because it's twice as wide.

Although many, many similar flights were made quite safely in that narrow box, I'm kind of relieved that they've shut it down. It was a trap, not worth the trouble of getting out of it safely.
Although I'm ticked-off that they waited until people got killed...

There is a lot about it that doesn't make sense, without assuming that they made too many assumptions.

As for aborting the last part of the turn and rolling out to the west, that building is not the only big one nearby... I can only assume that once they realized it wasn't working as planned, they chose to bank more, but not soon enough. Who knows?
  They may have even had a moment of fighting over the controls; it's been known to happen, even with two very experienced pilots.