Doomed to Fail - Ep 140 - Foggy with a Chance of Disaster: When Planes Hit Buildings in NYC

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

Actually, this has happened a few times! Join us as we talk through the times when planes and buildings collided in New York City! We are NOT talking about 9/11 because Taylor was there and she's just not interested in talking about it! In 2006 Yankees pitcher Cory Lidel crashed into an apartment building. In the 70s New York Airways had helicopter service from the Pan Am building to JFK that ended in disaster. And, in the 1940s two buildings, including the Empire State Building, were hit by WWII planes. Tune in to learn more! #NYC  https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2023/10/how-an-elevator-attendant-survived-a-1-000-ft-fall-down-the-empire-state-building-759670  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortlandall James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Boom. Taylor, we are back recording. How are you? Good. How are you? Good. Have you recovered from the weekend scare? Yes.

Yes. Yes. We are good to go. Four or five days will do. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. All good. Do you want to tell us what the name of the show is? Yes. Hello. Welcome to doomed to fail. We have a podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week. Every week. Today is Wednesday. I am Taylor, joined by Farris. I'm Fars. Hello.

Hello. So you kind of, you kind of teed us up already that you're going to be talking about 9-11. I'm absolutely not talking about 9-11. I just wanted to say, let's never do 9-11. I don't, here's the same. Okay, I'll say this. Like, I find any, so I think we're foreign, well, me, so we're different, right? Because you're there, and so you experienced it in like an emot, like, you experienced it differently than people across the country experience it because, like, you saw it.

And there's elements to 9-11 that I think I could keep kind of. kind of scratching the surface of because like we know the big picture of it but there's like probably like individual stories within it that like you don't know and what are you saying it's not worth knowing i don't want to know them you can learn them you can teach them to other people um i listened to the last podcast one which is really a long time ago but they had that was rough that one is rough that one that one's like phone calls and shit that i had not hurt and i'm not okay um so yeah just let's not do that okay that was the um That was the one of the few last podcast episodes where I had to, I never went back to a lot.

Most of them, the Oklahoma City one by comparison, I think I've listed that probably the entire series like 20 times. Because when they do their like redneck accents, it's like the funniest thing in the world. The Jones Town one gave me nightmares. That was a lot of. I also don't like going back to that one. Yeah. Those are ones they play like anyways. but I did want to tell you something related, similar stories.

I have four other stories of times that planes hit buildings in New York City. Oh, yeah. I love this. Yeah, let's hear. Cool. So, therefore, we'll go backwards from today. And we will start with October 11, 2006. Do you remember this one? like is this the irs a time no this is um they're all accidents um this is when new york yankees pitcher corey ladell little lydell crashed into an apartment building on the upper east side oh that sucks so if you're looking in new york city like a map it goes north south whatever the east side is on the right um the upper east side goes against the East River and then

across the East River is like Brooklyn and Queens New Jersey's on the other side just to think about what New York City looks like. Another thing, I know that we were just talking about how going to an island would be very dangerous. Another thing that I think is very dangerous

is if a rich person is like, why don't you come with me in this little plane that I own? I'd been a pilot for like 100 hours. You're only saying that because JFK Jr. He like ruined small planes for us. No, I'm saying that, like, it happens all the fucking time. And that's what happened here.

And it happens a lot. I'll stay and correct to them. I mean, do it to your own peril, but I'm not doing it. So Cory Liddell was 34 years old. He was a pitcher for the New York Yankees. He had spent some of his time in the minor leagues. Oh, also what did I mention about? Oh, yeah.

So he spent some time in the minor leagues. He's, I don't know. I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but it sounds like he was kind of a jerk. It took him a while to get into the MLB because in 1994, there was a major league baseball strike, and he was one of the strike breakers and went and played anyway. On May 8, 1997, he finally joined the MLB and joined the New York Mets. He's going to, between 1997 and 2006, I don't know how common this is, but he plays for like a bazillion teams. It plays for the Oakland days, the Toronto Blue Jays, the Cincinnati Reds, just and more.

Is that common? I bet because salary caps are really, really weird with baseball. MLB is like really weird. It's like a whole science around it and I have no idea how it works. Totally. There's like many ball. But it's like like the Yankees somehow are able to sign 15 players each with salaries of $200 million a year and it's still under their salary cap.

They must be doing some weird trading stuff. It has to play into like that part of it. That's not normal for most professional leagues though. Yeah. When Corey was traded to the Yankees, he was traded from the Phillies, who's also on the Phillies. And he said, quote, of the Phillies. He said, quote, on the days on pitching, it's almost a coin flip as to know if the guys behind me are going to be there to play 100%. So basically blaming it and everybody else when they do poorly.

He's like, it's not high balls, everybody else. By the way, Taylor, like that is actually not. uncommon like the the star receiver always blames the quarterback and the quarterback always like I'm just giving an example of the time I was like kind of an asshole later when he was on the Yankees in

the last game that he played he said we got matched up with the team that I think was a little more ready to play than we were which made the manager really really mad at him and he had to go on the sports radio to apologize and then he got in a fight with the sports radio hosts so like so that's that could be a reason why you get traded a lot because

yeah like if you're if you're if you're someone who like is that disruptive then yeah your your manager wants to get rid of you exactly so i think that's kind of his his attitude um he was married he had a son born in 2000 so his son was only six uh at this time but now um it is october 11th 2006 i am in grad school i think won and i just started dating so it's very exciting time to be in new york city um and corey wants to fly to california where he has a house i actually think that he's from like i think it's that he's from like Riverside like where like really close to here or West Covina really close to where I am um so he wants to fly his small plane California like he's fucking Amelia Earhart and can't just buy a plane ticket I mean it would be fun to have your own plane Taylor let's be honest like you know that'd be cool shit no no because I don't I know I would die on it yeah but if you're flying it yeah why would I no I want to be in a plane that my friend Ben is flying because he was in the military and now he flies for a major airline. Yeah, that's fair. I'd rather fly with Ben too. I don't even know you, Ben, but I think

I probably would rather fly with you than fly myself. Yeah. So the plane that he owns is a serious CIRR-U-S-R-S-R-20 is a teeny little thing. He's leaving Teterboro Airport, which is in New Jersey, and he's going to go to Nashville that night, then to Dallas, then get home in California. He is not alone on the plane. He's with his flight instructor, Tyler Stanger. I think that he was not qualified to fly totally by himself across the country. He's not

a millionaire. So they left Teterboro, they circled the Statue of Liberty, then they went up the East River. So if you go up the East River, you have to turn around, around Roosevelt Island, it's kind of in the middle of the East River. And

when they made that turn, it has to be a U-turn, and you have to be approved, to make that turn you have to have radio contact with um with like air control um but it sounds like he didn't he was flying pretty low at 700 feet and he's on visual cues which i feel like i learned a lot when i was like when coby Bryant died and we were like reading about that where like the pilot was off radar on visual cues we were like use the use the radar no taylor he wasn't on no hold on that situation was different he was supposed to be on so he was on radar but he was wasn't rated for pure instrument flying and was you trying to do it right okay are we saying the same

thing yes okay i'm misunderstanding yes i'm sorry so that so they're they're on visual cues um and at 242 p.m he hit the 30th floor of the bell air building on 524 east 72nd street so it's an apartment building um a woman named alana ben hurry was home and it was her apartment that he hit like directly. She suffered burns and shrapnel and her housekeeper was there and helped her escape. So she actually, no one in the building was killed and no one on the ground was killed, which is... He flew into her

build. That's... Can you imagine you're like just... Because someone just like crashed a plane into me? And 9-11 just happened five years ago. How freaky. Okay, yeah. Yeah. And it's like a big brick building, which I think was probably part of the

reason that it didn't cause more damage to like the building itself, you know, because like one of those old, like, pre-war buildings. Obviously, Corey and Tyler both died when the plane crashed. They didn't know, like, what was happening. And there was, like, a little bit of, like, the FBI was obviously alerted. President Bush was alerted. But they pretty quickly realized that it wasn't, like, an attack or anything.

It was just a dude. And he had made a poor U-turn and did that. So it was not deemed a national security issue. No flights from JFK or LaGuardia were halted. Just also to say there's like JFK and LaGuardia are in Queens. Newark Airport is in New Jersey and Teterboro is a little bit further out in New Jersey. They're all like kind of far away from the city, obviously. Corey's family tried to sue the makers of the SR 20 and say it was their fault, but the court threw it out.

They were like, no. It was a patent's fault. but you really don't know who the pilot was there's no way to tell but it's either courier Tyler who was a pilot so I um I I my guilty pleasure like in nights is watching mayday or um seconds to disaster which is like or airplane disasters like all it's like really highly produced like 40 minute long shows about like crazy airplane disasters because it's just like I don't know why I find it so fascinating I think it's because like the things that go wrong are things that nobody would ever think would go wrong and then they go

no totally we've talked about that so many times you know it's like all the little tiny things and like how also like they learn from each thing and all of that but like in this case it just sounds like they just like they just like made a shitty turn and they didn't have it themselves enough space yeah which like would where i was going with that was like why don't you just fly higher like you could be like you could go higher than whatever you could assume is in front of you just play her like I don't get at like I know I feel like maybe you're not allowed to you flew into someone's apartment it wasn't like you flew into like no I know house of the Chrysler building like no I know I understand I don't know that the answer I do know that like

the rules are going to be changed after this and you can't fly in visual cues only on the East river. Like, you have to be more contact. Also, like, there's bridges. I don't know. There's so many things you can hit if you're flying that low, you know? Wild. So, that happened 2006.

Then, 2001, 9-11, we're not talking about it. Then, the 60s and 70s. So these involve helicopters. And there's one story that has to do with a building, but then there's a bunch of other crashes that happen along helicopters. I'm going to tell you a little bit about those. too. The story kind of reminds me of like the hubris of the concord. Like some things are just they take the time they take and you don't push it. You know. Are you talking about like literally

the hubris of the concord? Is that or is that like a reference to like a play? Oh like literally like the hubris is being like we need to get here as fast as possible and like break the sound barrier. I mean yeah but yeah. All right. Well you know, indented disaster. We've talked about this. And then we were like, just take your seven hour of flight to London. No, but it didn't end a disaster because it was the Concord. It ended disaster because there was shrapnel on the tarmac after the previous plane. I watched a lot of these shows, Taylor. No, but the Concord didn't keep going after that.

Well, they didn't keep going after that, not because of that accident. It didn't keep going after that because it was already a super expensive program for British Airways to maintain. And they were really only doing it for the prestige. It was running at a loss. And it was just a pure business. calculus thing okay I'm yawning at you're mansplaining

do you want to send you the airway disaster we literally talked about this when I talked about the the Hindenberg we were like you should just like take a ship or you should just like take a long fight

there's no reason to push it and do something dangerous because the conquerors crashed before anyway I don't think that's true it crashed on the runway before I know it crashed once and then they shelved the program.

But I think it happened before. Are you guling? I guess I have to now. I mean, I'm totally fine being packed up. But I do remember after watching a thousand of these shows, they're issues. Oh, it did. All right, fine.

How do you like woman explaining to me? I like it because woman splating involves looking stuff up and just telling you. you with the truth. No. If you say something with enough confidence, it sounds true. That's exactly what mansplaining is. Congratulations.

You just mansplained, mansplaining to me. Double wamby. All right. So, anyway, something's take the time that they take, is my point. It's kind of hard to get to the airport in New York City. So it's like a $100 cab ride. And it's only after I wrote all the ways down to get to the airport,

it's not that hard. It's just like the airports aren't like in the city, which makes sense because I don't, they shouldn't be. Um, so like it's a $100 cab ride. There's a bus from Queens, but you have to take the subway really far to get there to get to LaGuardia. I once told my uncle Dale like the directions vaguely and he missed his flight because he like didn't make it. And like it's just like not easy, especially before you had like a iPhone. Um, there's a train to JFK and the JFK air train. Actually, last time we went, we went to Newark and it was pretty easy. You take the Amtrak. from Newark. And anyway, I also was reading this. I finished reading this book. And I feel like you sent me something. This is a really weird deep dig. But you sent me something in January about like goals for the year and someone's goal was to finish reading the power broker.

Do you remember that? No. Anyway, this is the power broker. This book is so big that when I opened it today to find the page that I wanted to find, I found a leaf that I'd been pressing because I pressed flowers. inside of it. That's how big this book is. But in the power broker, they talk about Robert Moses, who built all of the highways in New York City and to the detriment of

lots of communities. But he wanted people to use the highways. So he had an opportunity to build like a really easy train that went to the airport. And he didn't do it because he liked people who'd be in cars. And I was mad when I read that. Yeah, what was a wasted opportunity? I spent on freaking caps. But anyway, it's a 1970s. And there is a company called.

called New York Airways, and they are a helicopter company. They offer a shuttle service between Manhattan and local airports. New York Airways operated from 1949 to 1979 out of LaGuardia. They were doing like a passenger helicopter thing. So it was like a nice helicopter. There was like a flight attendant and it can take you places like really, really quickly. And it went all over the New York City area, especially like hopping between airports, which I think, you know, people still, obviously, like, use helicopters a lot in New York.

There's plenty of helicopter reports. I worked at the hedge fund. My boss, what time he spoke at Princeton, I think? And he took a helicopter. It took, like, 10 minutes to get there. There's something, like, ridiculous. So, like... Wait, this is normal for people.

So people in New York take helicopters regularly to the airport? Rich people do. Uh, so there's not like a taxi that, like, you can just... So that's what this was. It was expensive, but it was, like, they would do like in the late 70s they were doing like 24 um flights a day from Manhattan to the airport and I'll tell you in about the in a second like what that sounded what that was like um but they would land on a helipad in the 70s on top of the Pan Am building

which is now the MetLife building in like the middle of New York so it would land on top of the building um and then take you to the airport so a few non building related crashes is. In 1963, a helicopter crashed after takeoff from Idlewild. So JFK used to be called Ida Wild. So off from JFK Airport and six people died. In 1969, they were running late. So a pilot at the airport in the helicopter decided to take off from not the place that he was supposed to take off from. And they got stuck and they got pushed in like a jet stream from a big plane that was going off the way it was supposed to. And that caused the, the, helicopter to crash three people of the 14 people on board died in that accident they took a they had been flying from the Pan Am building in the middle of Manhattan to JFK pretty regularly and they took a break for about 10 years I don't know exactly why that's probably a really big reason why but they resumed doing it in 1977 and actually I know this is also pre-911 like security and shit and you just had like a piece of paper and they would like let you want on an airplane.

But you could and this like my initial point with the hubris part is like just take the train or take a cab. You know, like whatever, but you don't have to do this. But this sounds fucking amazing. You could get it to the MetLife building in the middle of Manhattan 40 minutes before your flight left from JFK. That's how fast it was. It took 10 minutes to get there. So you could check it at the MetLife building, get on the helicopter, 10 minutes of JFK and get on your plane. Dude, I think that's why Kobe did the helicopter thing because he just.

skipped traffic. Well, he didn't live in L.A. I don't think. He lived like somewhere outside of L.A. And so he would just catch a helicopter from his house

to Staples. I read something that like reading about Kobe, how like he, one time he went to someone's house for Thanksgiving and he took a helicopter there and he realized he forgot like the fucking pumpkin pie.

So he helicoptered back home, got it and then went back to the person's house. Taylor, how awesome would being that rich be. I mean, it's just like, I can't even comprehend it. It's wild. Wild. One day.

So, but this was, it was like, so like, I guess to clarify, like, it wasn't like cheap, like everybody couldn't do it, but enough people were doing it, you know, taking this, like, commuter helicopter over there. So in 1977, this is the building one. The helicopter was on the roof of the Pan Am building when the landing gear broke. And it was like just like sitting there. like a helicopter. And helicopters also,

they're so fucking scary because there's no like gliding, you know, it was full. So the landing gear broke and it tipped over, but the propellers were going. Five people on the roof

were killed by propeller blades and one person on the ground was killed by a propeller blade. Wait, so was it stationary? Like it was already sitting, they turned the blades on. Mm-hmm. The skid broke.

Yeah, and it tipped over. Yeah, that's freaky. And people would just like, blendered on the roof and then one guy on the ground got hit by a helicopter blade which is a wild way to go um so no one inside the building was hurt but after that they didn't do it again they never they never went from the pan-in building which again um why why was a pan-in building a problem i think that the i think it was just too dangerous to do the whole thing oh they just stopped operations yeah of the of that part of it of like because the helicopter pads in

Manhattan or at like the bottom they're it they're like downtown like to the side you know they're in the middle of the city you know for the most part okay like they're like you you can you could probably pay to grab a helicopter from like downtown New York but like maybe super rich people in like hospitals have like helicopters on the roofs but like not every not it's not like a passenger thing um and then finally on April 18th 1979 so two years later um a helicopter from American or from New York Airways was departing from Newark Airport. There was a crash when the blades failed

while they were taking off and the helicopter plummeted back to the ground. Three people died, 13 were injured and that was the last day of New York Airways. Do you like always die when a helicopter crashes? Well, not everyone died in this one.

That one was, they weren't very high. It doesn't sound like, but it just sounds like you hear a lot more about people dying in helicopters and you hear about dying and like playing crashes. It seems harder to survive because like it just drops. It's straight down. Yeah. I guess that's true.

Yeah. So that was that. That's the end of New York Airways and their helicopters. Going further back on May 20th, 1946, a U.S. Air Force beachcraft C-45 Expeditor, which is you know, like a World War II

era plane crashed into 41,000, Wall Street downtown. It was headed for Newark. And again, like, we want the airport to be far away from the city, you know, so they were heading it. But they headed through Manhattan, which to your point, why higher. Yeah. You know, like out of the rules. But they hit the 58th floor at 8.10 p.m., which was nice because nobody was there. And five people on the plane died. This was the incident, even though the last incident, I'll tell you, also had to do with fog. But this was the incident that caused them to make the rules that you cannot fly over New York City in heavy fog, which totally makes sense. Again, so many of these things are like, why did nobody just say that?

And so this, I have another story just like incidentally. So I was listening to Case File. Do you ever listen to that? No, I never got into that. So the most recent episode on Case File was about a boat called the Bluebell, and there's like a murder, it's a true crime story, all the things. But one thing that they brought up that I thought was really interesting is this was a bluebell incident was in 1961, and a little girl survived, and they found her, like, floating

in the ocean. When she was floating in the ocean, she had on a, like, was on a life jacket. The life jacket was white, because up until that time, life jackets were white, and then they were like we barely saw her because the water is white when it like breaks so that's when they changed life jackets to being orange it's like duh so like after after it you're like well duh we want to see something bright orange and not white which could be a color that you see unwaived all the time but like it has to happen before we like do things that are obvious in so many cases you know yeah no why um okay my last story for you is from july 28th 1945 when a b-5

52 Mitchell Bomber crashed into the Empire State Building. I remember this one. I used to go to the dentist in the Empire State Building, which I thought was very cool. Did living in New York has be so wild? Like, you're so close to so much, just crazy history. And I used to go to the, um, my therapist was across the street from the Empire State Building. And I used to walk from work. I'd go to work.

I'd take the train to her office. And then I would leave and I would walk past Empire State Building and then go meet friends like on the east side like every Tuesday or whatever and one time I was walking past Empire State Building and I just missed by like three minutes someone jumping off of it and landing on the sidewalk. Are you kidding? I was like I told my therapist I was like I would have had to turn on my heel and go back to therapy like excuse me let me back in. Is that was that like a common thing? I don't think so. I mean it happens I don't know how often it happens but definitely It happened that day, and there's plenty of stories of people doing it.

But I was very grateful to have missed that. I can't imagine, like, a worse. Oh, God, so horrible. No. No. It's like also, like, also fuck that person that did that because, like, you destroyed the lives in, like, every dream a person would have who witnesses that for the next, like, 25 years.

I mean, I'm very grateful. Like, I would literally see that in my mind every time. I can close my eyes next like 20 years. Have you ever seen similar, another Empire State Building story, the picture of Evelyn Mikhail, which is called the Most Beautiful Suicide? No. So I'm just on Wikipedia real fast, but Evelyn McHale was 23 years old when she jumped off the Empire State Building in 1947.

And she landed on a car and she looks like she is sleeping. And the car roof is completely questioned. um i don't know if you've ever seen it wow it's pretty incredible but like it's it looks like she's laying in like a satin bed yeah it looks like that it's like perfectly wraps around her and then like they when they lifted her up like obviously her bones are just like all destroyed you know like so crazy yeah wild so yeah people do it wild um which actually Taylor that now I'm remembering, that is the reason why I don't listen to the 9-11 episode is because they have video or they have audio recordings of people being like, is that paper coming out of there? No, it's a filing cabinet. And then you can hear the gas like, that's a person. And they realize it. It's like, dude, like you don't want to be around that. You don't want to witness that. So anybody who tries to kill themselves by throwing themselves off a building, like do it somewhere different. Like, I mean, it's just traumatizing for. Do it, but like if you do it, get help, all the things.

Definitely don't do it where you, like, destroy other people's lives. Yeah, I'm very, very grateful that I did not see that man fall off there. But anyway, we're on the Empire State Building. It's World War II. A B-52 bomber is being flown by a veteran. He's 27 years old. His name is Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith. And so the B-52 bomber is like a heavy World War II.

looking bomber. I was like, the Inola Gay was a B-29. I'm sure there's like tons of reasons why, but just picture like a World War II plane. It was very, very foggy. It was Saturday. So another very foggy. And then again, like I used to work on the 38th floor of a building. And there were days where it was so foggy, we couldn't see the street, you know? And they're going to hit the Empire State Building on the 79th floor. So if it's foggy, the people in the building also, like that plane would come out of nowhere, you know? I was scary. We could see nothing. You're You're, like, literally in the cloud, even when you're in the building. Just, like, hoping someone doesn't run into you.

Again, that's the point of the obvious. Fly higher. Also, like, flying cars were never going to happen. Can you imagine? It's so fucking dangerous. Like, what? Like, also, like, the Jetsons, who won't see a pill for dinner? Like, they lied to us about everything.

No, no. dumb. They're never going to, never going to work. People crash all the time on the ground. We don't need to add like another dimension to it. Anyway, so he got disoriented, like obviously. He didn't, was able to see clearly and he was going low. And in this case, this actually maybe as a point when you're flying in the fog, I do think this happened in the co-beating too where you're trying to get under it or over it, like whatever, you know, like trying to find a spot where you can see. And so he went, um, he ended, up going down a little bit, and he made a wrong turn. He almost hit the Chrysler building,

turned, and then he hit the Empire State Building on the 79th floor at 9.40 a.m. One of the engines fell off, like in Final Destination, and hit the roof of a building a block away and burned an apartment, but no one died from that particular thing. The upper engine fell down an elevator shaft as like, and they found at the bottom. 14 people ended up being killed. So three people who were on the plane, so there's Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith. There is another person. One of the people who was there, I read two conflicting stories, but his name was Albert Perna. He was a Navy machinist.

He was ejected from the plane, and his body was either found at the bottom of an elevator shaft or on a building across the street, depending on who you believe. But poor Albert had hitched a ride on this flight to get home to see his parents. because his parents, I just found out that his brother had died in the South Pacific. Ugh. That's awful? Yeah. We're fucking parents.

Eleven people in the building were killed. They were working. It was Saturday, but they were working for the War Relief Services and the National Catholic Welfare Council. So it's like people doing like charity work to try to help people because they're in the middle of fucking World War II. And they were the offices that were like crashed by the plane. It did cause a fire, but like the way that the building was built, the fire did. spread and didn't hurt the building structurally. So the building, like, didn't, nothing else happened.

So one woman, this is the last bit of this. This woman, Betty Lou Oliver, she was an elevator operator. So, as you know, in the past, someone had to, like, do the elevator for you. So Betty Lou was the elevator operator. When the plane crashed into the building, she was on the 80th floor. And she got burned and, like, flashes of lights and she was burned. And the people on the 80th floor, like, rescue. workers were coming to her. They took her out of the elevator. They took her down a few flights to

the 75th floor, put her on a new elevator to get her some help. She's on the elevator by herself, and it goes into free fall from the 75th floor. There's no breaks. All of the cables are completely broken. She survives. She's in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest elevator free fall survival did she jump no she was injured she was burned she told she told well i think she was okay listen to this no but at the very end i think if you jump no no no i know but listen she said quote i started yelling and pounding on the floor i was going down so fast that it had to hang on to the size of the elevator to keep from floating so she was kind of in the air but so she was cushioned by like the air pocket that it made by going down so fast and that's what

saved her. I mean, saved her. She broke her pelvis. She broke her back and she broke her neck, but she lived. Be bad. So she ended up dying in her 70s and she stopped talking about it. She had a couple interviews and she was like, I don't want this to be like my legacy and I can talk about anymore. But she still is in the Guinness Book of World Records for that terrifying world record. There's a cute picture of her on crutches that I'll share. Again, breaks on elevators in skyscrapers. did it take until this moment to realize we might need that i think they broke i think that the word

breaks but they broke oh okay in this case but i'm sorry otis i think the first elevator probably didn't take it back otis it's your fault the last thing that i will mention is just incidentally so everyone and the emperor say building was able to go back to work on monday like it didn't unless you died you know the rest of the building worked by monday um the floors that were destroyed in the crash were bought by Armand Hammer, whose Army Hammer's great-grandfather so he could do his dirty business there. And that should be a whole story because I looked up his Wikipedia page and there's a lot of... What does dirty business mean? Is it like P. Diddy stuff or... No. It's like in cahoots with Russia stuff.

Ah, got it. Yeah. Other dirty. Yeah. I mean, I don't know all the details, but it sounds kind of wild. But he bought those stores for cheap and set up business in there. for that. And that's it. Those are the two times in the 1940s, one time in the 1970s and two times in the 2000s when planes crashed into buildings. So several things.

Okay, first off, things back then were built different. I agree. I do think that like the brick, like the Empire State Building, have you been in it? No. Probably not. It's it feels heavy does that even make sense it feels heavy in the way that like where we used to work in LA felt heavy

no I know I think so when I mentioned like we talked at one point about like going to the capital and like different places in D.C and like this doesn't feel like it was built by contractors that I have access to hire you know what I mean? Right. Lowest better guys and all the same.

Yeah. Yeah. So because I also am reflecting on stories about like kamikaze pilots during World War II and the distinction between ironclad ships and how we call what we call ironclad was like hey

like they weren't meant to be easily destroyable and that's what they called them ironclad and how Comicazi pilots like flying a plane into a ship would not sink a ship like it would it would hurt people and probably kill some

and they could continue fighting like that afternoon after some patchwork and so right yeah yeah yeah I agree but then the other thing it made me think of with your helicopter's road was two things one was on this Friday this or this past Friday I was driving downtown and I don't live near a military base I know you do but like I don't see shit like that regularly and I was in rush hour traffic in downtown Austin and you could just hear the chopping of wind because it's so guttural like there's one time I went to a

firing range and it was in the basement and it was like just surrounded by a foundation and every time someone fired a shot off you had earmuffs on so you didn't totally hear the complete sound of the gunshot your body

compressed in ways yeah you felt it and I was driving down town I saw these five choppers overhead doing a loop over the highway and then like kind of making their way around it was like obviously like a military thing and i thought it was really really cool and yeah it's all the time and my favorite storyteller i'm gonna finish with this so i was when i was in law school in miami i was living on a 32nd floor of a building in downtown miami and this was maybe like a week before the

Correspondence Center in 2010, I want to say. Somewhere around there. Hi, Flo. And in the middle of the night, I heard that same kind of reverberation, and I went on my balcony, and there were these crazy looking helicopters

that were flying right past my balcony to a building that's higher up than my building, and men were falling down from it like coming down on a rope onto the roof and then another they would climb back up and then another cop chopper would come

and they'd do this routine over and over and you can tell me you're looking like a weird operation because you're like this is a crazy looking helicopter and and like I have no idea if it's related it was like a week or so later that Obama said that we killed bin Laden and

it was a helicopter operation it was like do they like practicing for bin Laden's killing like on that building I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. It was really weird because I was like, in the middle of downtown Miami,

why would you have, yeah, there's something when you look at and you're just like, like, this isn't normal. Yeah. That was definitely not normal. Totally. They weren't like helicopters you see on TV.

These were like weird looking, like, I don't know. I see the most time they have like two sets of blades, you know, They're definitely military ones. You can tell. It's not like the traffic helicopter. You know, like...

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're fun. Anyways, um, fun stories. Taylor, those are really fun. I am on this most beautiful suicide Wikipedia page in the saddest part is reading her suicide note where it says, um, at the very end, her suicide note said, tell my father.

I have too many of my mother's tendencies. So like, it's like, you know that dad just berated that mom in front of her. and the mom was like you're just like me and just like I don't need to be you know like you just know that like it was just some horrible childhood abuse going on there poor thing that's terrible yeah yeah just don't kill yourself everything's fucking everything's temporary yeah yeah anyways um cool well thank you for listening I will see you all next week you can find us at doomed to fill a pod YouTube Instagram, TikTok, that's our website. That's our email, jimdifelpod at gmail.com.

Please do those things. Let us know. Let us know. Do you have thoughts? Do you have ideas? I think we're getting better at this. I mean, we've been doing it for a very, very long time, which is wild and I'm really proud of us. I'd be prouder if we could make money doing this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's a about to be sweater time so I can start wearing my sweater with our faces on it to soccer games. That's my one way to personally advertise. I'll drink from our mug tomorrow. Chiarre did suggest, I think I sent you this, that putting like little flyers with the QR codes around Austin and coffee shops, you should do that. So I was going to do with my yoga studio.

I should just do it. Do it. Okay. Do it, do it, do it. What do you? What do you? Where do you Hold on, we can talk about this offline. I can make you one. Let's wrap it, then we can discuss it. I also mentioned that, yeah, I was totally wrong about QR codes. I said these are dumb. No one's going to use them, and they, people use them all the time. So I apologize to you, Mr. QR who invented QR codes.

I kind of still think they're dumb. Quentin Robinson, but I, but I put them on, like, I feel like I made one for work to take you to like a Google Doc that says a bunch of stuff. that you could just have up on your phone and like show someone we're gonna you're gonna put them our all cafes in austin i don't know i think that they're here to stay like the internet you think the internet's here to stay not indefinitely but it'll be some variation probably probably probably um sweet anything else to wrap on that's it thank you so much sweet we'll go to them wrap and

Thank you.