Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle said flying relieved the stress of his pro baseball life. But for his instructor, Tyler Stanger, flying was life itself and had been since he was a boy.
Both were on an aerial tour of New York City when Lidle's plane, which took off from New Jersey's Teterboro Airport, slammed into a Manhattan high-rise Wednesday. It was not clear who was at the controls. Lidle had been licensed for less than a year while Stanger, 26, had been flying since he was a teen.
He trained Lidle at his tiny, two-plane flight school at Brackett Field in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles. He was a common and popular visitor to the airport's coffee shop, Norm's Hangar, where he often took students for debriefing.
"He was such a sweet guy, a genuinely down-to-earth person,'' owner Kathy Touche said Thursday, wiping away a tear. "He seemed kind of shy to me at first. He was more quiet until you got to know him, and then he opened up.''
Dave Conriguez, the cook and a baseball fan, showed a laminated check with Lidle's autograph that he got when Stanger brought the ballplayer to the shop.
He last spoke to Stanger on Sunday. The instructor told him he was heading to New York, Conriguez said.
"They were going to fly back together. It was right after the loss to Detroit,'' he said. "Tyler's such a great flight instructor that I never gave it a second thought. It was just, 'See you in a week.'''
He had told Stanger "as soon as Cory gets back, I'm going to have my picture taken with him in a Yankee hat,'' Conriguez said.
Stanger earned his pilot's license by 17 and earned a degree in aviation management from Southern Illinois University, according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. In addition to his flight school, he worked for several years as an aircraft mechanic at Howard Aviation, also located at the airport about 40 miles east of Los Angeles.
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