80th anniversary! B-25 hits Empire State Building, July 28, 1945

 On Saturday, July 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell bomber, piloted in thick fog by Lieutenant Colonel William Franklin Smith, Jr., crashed into the north side of the Empire State Building, between the 79th and 80th floors.

One engine shot through the side opposite the impact and flew as far as the next block where it landed on the roof of a nearby building, starting a fire that destroyed a penthouse. The other engine and part of the landing gear plummeted down an elevator shaft. The resulting fire was extinguished in 40 minutes. 14 people were killed in the accident.

Despite the damage and loss of life, the building was open for business on many floors on the following Monday. A year later, another aircraft narrowly missed striking the building.

One elevator fell from the seventy-fifth floor with a woman Betty Lou Oliver aboard—an elevator operator. (The operator of the other one had stepped out for a cigarette.) By the time the car survived a plunge of 75 stories and crashed into the buffer in the pit (a hydraulic truncheon designed to be a cushion of last resort), a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it, serving as a kind of spring. A pillow of air pressure, as the speeding car compressed the air in the shaft, may have helped ease the impact as well. Still, the landing was not soft. The car’s walls buckled, and steel debris tore up through the floor. It was the woman’s good fortune to be cowering in a corner when the car hit. She was severely injured but alive. That still stands as the Guinness World Record for the longest survived elevator fall recorded.