Bob Chilcoat wrote:
My first thought after hearing
that they were cruising on the river in a considerably faster airplane than
mine was "They went up the East river?!" Could they simply have run out of
room?

Now that I've learned that the instructor was not an NYC metro area
instructor, things start to make sense. A rough theory:

- Yankee flies instructor out to fly back to CA with him.
- Instructor has never seen NYC from the air
- 88 hour pilot takes foreign instructor for sightseeing flight before
heading west
- The pair go up the wrong river, possibly following one of the amphibs
that live up there.
- Rather than fessing up and asking for clearance through the LGA space,
they attempt impossible turn

When I first started to get true facts about the crash, I couldn't
believe a local instructor would allow them to be there in the first
place, so I suspected a mechanical problem. A new pilot and an
unfamiliar instructor changes a bunch of things.