The pilot of a World War II plane was killed after his aircraft crashed into the Hudson River Friday, officials and witnesses said.
The single-seater P-47 Thunderbolt fighter began smoking and listing to one side as it buzzed over the water and went down just south of the Edgewater Marina in Edgewater, N.J., around 7:30 p.m., witnesses said.
“It made kind of a U-turn and then there was a stream of smoke coming from it,” said Siqi Li, 22, a Hunter College student from Manhattan. “It was tilting down toward the water I thought they were doing some sort of trick. I didn’t realize it at first but it was a plane crash.”
The man at the controls of the doomed single engine plane was 56-year-old Bill Gordon, according to the NYPD.
The experienced pilot, originally from upstate Copake, in Columbia County, had spent years as the Chief Pilot of the Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome and had recently flown in a show near his new home in Key West, Florida.
Gordon was pulled from the plane around three hours later, police sources said.
“When we found him the canopy was partially opened, it was pulled back,” a police source said. “It look like he tried to escape. We reached in, found the foot and pulled him out.”
The vintage aircraft was with two other planes that departed the American Airpower Museum at Republic Airport in Farmingdale, L.I., on a photo flight, according to museum spokesman Gary Lewi.
The P-47, known as “Jacky’s Revenge,” is registered to Jeff Clyman who declined to comment Friday night, referring all questions to Lewi.
“It suffered some sort of catastrophic failure and the pilot decided to put it down in the Hudson,” Lewi said. “It’s a tragedy.”
Gordon and theP-47 were scheduled to perform at Bethpage Air Show at Jones Beach this weekend, Lewi said.
In the past, Gordon had flown a variety of different aircrafts in the annual show.
Some witnesses said it sounded like the plane was having engine trouble just before it nosedived into the river.
Carla Nager was standing on her terrace at an apartment complex in Edgewater, N.J., with her husband when she heard “a sputtering” that sounded like an engine stalling.
“It wasn’t a nose dive, but he was descending rapidly,” Nager said. “He just came down, and boom, he was gone.”
A source said the pilot sent out a distress signal before the crash.
“It was flying in a perfect circle and then suddenly it shifted,” said Fahad Najam, 36. “An FDNY boat was already heading in that direction and then it went down.”
Najam said he sensed something was wrong as the craft circled for almost 30 minutes.
“There was a lot of helicopter traffic, but he was doing nothing to avoid them,” Najam said. “In fact they were trying to get out of his way.”
The plane was submerged in a matter of seconds, witnesses said.
The FDNY were able to tether a rope to the plane after they arrived, according to officials. The craft was on the river bottom in about 20 feet of water.
Despite earlier reports by the New Jersey State Police, the pilot was unable to escape, said NYPD Deputy Chief Rodney Harrison.
A man who was pulled from the water and hospitalized was a swimmer who may have been trying to aid the rescue, sources said.
New Jersey State Police later retracted its statement, saying there had been “conflicting reports from scene of plane crash” and that it could “no longer confirm swimmer in water was pilot.”
