photo #8775638

July 28, 1945. Saturday morning, 9:40 AM. New York City was wrapped in fog so thick that visibility had dropped to near zero. Above Manhattan, Lieutenant Colonel William Franklin Smith Jr. was piloting a B-25 Mitchell bomber, trying to navigate through clouds that had turned the city into an invisible maze below.Smith was experienced—a decorated veteran with hundreds of flight hours. He was ferrying the medium bomber from Bedford Army Air Field in Massachusetts to Newark Airport in New Jersey, a routine transport flight that should have taken just over an hour. Two other crew members were aboard: Staff Sergeant Christopher Domitrovich and Navy Machinist's Mate Albert Perna, hitching a ride.But the fog was worse than forecasted. Smith radioed LaGuardia Airport requesting permission for instrument-guided landing. The tower advised him to divert to Newark and maintain visual contact with the East River while navigating south through Manhattan's airspace.It was terrible advice. In 1945, instrument flying was still relatively primitive. There was no modern air traffic control, no radar guidance, no GPS. Pilots navigated by sight, by instruments that were crude by modern standards, and by nerve. In thick fog over one of the world's most densely built cities, Smith was essentially flying blind.At 9:40 AM, cruising at approximately 250 mph at an altitude of just under 1,000 feet—catastrophically low over Manhattan—Smith emerged from fog and suddenly saw buildings. Everywhere. He was surrounded by skyscrapers, too close, too fast.He pulled up hard, trying to climb above the buildings. The B-25 roared upward, engines screaming.But there was one building too tall, too close, too sudden: the Empire State Building, at 1,250 feet the world's tallest structure.Smith had seconds to react. He banked hard, trying to avoid it. But at 250 mph with a 56-foot wingspan, in fog, with buildings on all sides, there was nowhere to go.The B-25 Mitchell bomber, weighing 20,000 pounds and carrying nearly 1,000 gallons of high-octane aviation fuel, slammed into the north face of the Empire State Building between the 78th and 79th floors.The impact was catastrophic. The plane essentially disintegrated on contact, its aluminum fuselage crumpling against the steel and concrete structure. Both engines tore free. One punched completely through the building, exited the south side, and crashed through the roof of a nearby building, starting a fire there. The other engine and part of the landing gear crashed down an elevator shaft.The fuel ignited instantly. A massive fireball erupted from the impact site, consuming the 79th floor and spreading to the 78th and 80th floors. Windows shattered. Office furniture, papers, and debris rained down onto 34th Street below. People on the streets looked up to see the Empire State Building—the symbol of New York's might—on fire and pouring smoke.Inside, chaos. The 79th floor housed the offices of the Catholic War Relief Services. Employees were at their desks, working on a Saturday morning. The impact killed eleven of them instantly—crushed by the plane's fuselage, incinerated by burning fuel, or killed by flying debris.But the most miraculous and horrifying story belonged to Betty Lou Oliver, a 20-year-old elevator operator working that morning.Betty Lou was in an elevator car near the 80th floor when the plane hit. The impact threw her from the elevator. She was burned and injured but alive. Rescuers found her, administered first aid, and made a fateful decision: they'd evacuate her via elevator to get her medical help quickly.They placed her in a different elevator car on the 79th floor and sent her down. What they didn't know was that the crash had severed elevator cables throughout the shaft.Betty Lou Oliver began her descent. Then the cables snapped.She fell 75 stories. Over 1,000 feet. Straight down. In an elevator car that became a metal coffin plummeting at terminal velocity toward the basement.The elevator crashed into the basement with impact that should have been instantly fatal. The car was destroyed. The bottom of the shaft was a twisted wreckage of metal.But Betty Lou Oliver survived.Impossibly, miraculously, survived. The severed cables had fallen into the shaft beneath the elevator, creating a crude coil of cable at the bottom that acted as a makeshift shock absorber. The elevator's emergency brakes, though unable to stop the fall, created enough friction against the shaft walls to slow the descent slightly. And the elevator car itself, though destroyed, absorbed much of the impact.Betty Lou was critically injured—fractured spine, burns, broken limbs—but alive. Rescuers extracted her from the wreckage, stunned that anyone could survive such a fall. She would spend months in the hospital but would eventually recover, living until 1999.Her fall remains, to this day, the longest survived elevator fall in history—a Guinness World Record no one wants to break.On the streets below, panic. Debris continued falling—pieces of airplane, office furniture, building materials, everything consumed by the impact and fire. People ran for cover. Police cordoned off the area. Fire trucks raced to the scene, but how do you fight a fire 79 stories up in 1945?Firefighters charged up the stairs—no working elevators, just legs and determination and 79 flights of stairs while carrying equipment. By the time they reached the fire, it had been burning for nearly thirty minutes. But the building's design—its steel frame and concrete construction—had contained the blaze, preventing it from spreading uncontrollably.Within 40 minutes, the fire was under control. Within hours, it was out.The building stood. Damaged, yes. Scarred, absolutely. But standing. The structural integrity had held. The impact had been tremendous—a 20,000-pound aircraft traveling 250 mph carrying 1,000 gallons of fuel—but the Empire State Building's engineers had designed it to withstand hurricane-force winds and other stresses. The bomber, devastating as it was, wasn't enough to bring down the tower.This would become important knowledge decades later, though no one in 1945 could have imagined why.Final toll: 14 dead. The three crew members aboard the plane, all killed instantly. Eleven people in the building. Dozens injured, including Betty Lou Oliver. It could have been so much worse—the building held 10,000 workers on weekdays, but this was Saturday morning, and many floors were largely empty.New York responded the way New York always does: by getting back to work. Repairs began immediately. Undamaged floors reopened within days. The damaged sections were cleared, repaired, and restored. Within two months, the Empire State Building was fully operational again, the hole patched, the fire damage repaired, business resuming as if nothing had happened.Because that's what the city does. It absorbs disasters and keeps going.The crash did lead to changes. Air traffic control procedures were improved. Regulations about flying over dense urban areas were strengthened. Instrument flight procedures were refined. The military developed better protocols for navigating in poor weather near cities.But mostly, the incident became a footnote—a bizarre wartime accident, a reminder that even in peacetime (the war in Europe had ended three months earlier; Japan would surrender two weeks later), danger could strike from unexpected angles.For decades, the 1945 crash was a historical curiosity. Tour guides mentioned it. History buffs studied it. But it wasn't front-of-mind for most New Yorkers.Then came September 11, 2001. And suddenly, a plane crashing into a New York skyscraper wasn't a historical curiosity—it was a living nightmare.In the aftermath of 9/11, people remembered the 1945 crash and drew comparisons. But the comparisons highlighted the differences: the B-25 was relatively small (20,000 pounds vs. over 100,000 pounds for the 767s that hit the Twin Towers). It was traveling slower. It carried less fuel. The Empire State Building's construction was different—steel frame with masonry and concrete vs. the Towers' tube-frame design.The 1945 crash proved the Empire State Building's resilience but didn't predict what would happen in 2001. Different planes, different buildings, different circumstances, different outcomes.Today, if you visit the Empire State Building, there's little visible evidence of the crash. The repairs were thorough. The hole was patched. The building has been renovated multiple times since 1945. You'd never know a bomber once punched through the 79th floor.But the story endures as a reminder of several things:The fragility of safety—how quickly routine becomes catastrophe when fog obscures, when judgment fails, when circumstances conspire against even experienced pilots.The resilience of good engineering—how the building withstood impact that should have caused catastrophic damage, how design choices made in the 1930s saved lives in 1945.The miracle of survival—how Betty Lou Oliver fell 75 stories and lived, how dozens of people on the 79th floor escaped death by feet or seconds, how tragedy could have been so much worse.And New York's essential character—the way the city simply repaired the damage and moved on, business as usual within weeks, because that's what New York does. It absorbs hits and keeps standing.Lieutenant Colonel William Smith's last moments are unknowable. Did he see the Empire State Building emerge from the fog? Did he have time to realize what was about to happen? Did he try to avoid it, or did impact come too fast for reaction?What we know is that an experienced pilot, in impossible conditions, made a navigation error that cost him his life and thirteen others. Not malice. Not recklessness. Just fog, and misjudgment, and the unforgiving physics of airplanes meeting skyscrapers.July 28, 1945. The day a bomber hit the Empire State Building and the building won. The day Betty Lou Oliver survived the unsurvivable. The day New York proved once again that it could take a hit and keep standing.Fourteen people died. But because of structural engineering, emergency response, and random fortune, hundreds more survived.The Empire State Building still stands, 1,454 feet tall, exactly where it stood that foggy morning when a lost bomber came too low through the clouds.Still standing. Still strong. Still New York.