‘I heard a big crash’
Woman dies, 2 men hurt as seaplane hits pier in Qns.
A single-engine seaplane crashed into a concrete pier in Queens on Sunday, killing a woman inside and critically injuring the pilot and another passenger, FDNY officials said.
The propeller plane crashed into a pier at 158th St. at Powell Cove Blvd. in Whitestone just after 3 p.m., near the Throgs Neck Bridge, police and fire officials said.
A group of three jet skiers saw the crash and rushed in to assist, said John Polito, 45, who witnessed the incident.
“I heard it. It sounded like a tractor trailer going full-blast down my block. And then I heard a big crash,” he said. “I walked in the back, nothing. All of a sudden I looked over the wall, and the plane was already against the wall, smashed up.”
“Thank God there were those three jet skiers out there,” he added. “They pulled up to the adjoining dock, hopped off, and got two people out.”
Those people, both men, were the pilot and a passenger, officials said. Polito said both looked like their legs suffered compound fractures.
Firefighters pulled a female passenger out of the plane, but she died of her injuries, FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro said. The pilot and male passenger were hospitalized in critical condition.
The pilot, identified by neighbors as Joe Oppedisano, lives in a mansion on Riverside Drive, just two blocks down from the crash.
“The pilot is a local resident known to many of the folks around here. He flies in and out of here, I would say often, and the plane is usually kept here,” he said. “There’s a hangar behind his home, right on the water. So the assumption is that he was landing but all of that is still up for investigation.”
Oppedisano, 61, owns Il Bacco II Ristorante in Little Neck.
“He’s fine. The last we heard now, he’s talking,”g his brother, Rocco Oppedisano, told the Daily News on Sunday night.
Rocco Oppedisano said he last spoke to his brother Sunday morning, then, in the afternoon, his phone started ringing.
“Everybody started calling the phone, and said, a plane crashed on Riverside Drive, I said, ‘What?’ ” he recalled. He then learned it was his brother’s plane.p
He described the 61-yearold woman who died as a “very good friend,” but wouldn’t say more about her. “The family is just a mess right now,” he said.
Nigro said the plane hit and jumped onto the pier, landing in pieces.
“Witnesses said that the plane was traveling rather fast along the water, skipped twice and hit the pier,” Nigro said. “Whyy this happenedpp we have no idea right now.”
A jet skier and one other person received medical treatment at the scene, he said.
In a statement Sunday, the Federal Aviation Authority described the plane as a single-engine Cessna 182. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the crash, according to the statement.