At 9:49 on the drizzly, misty morning of July 28, 1945, an Army B-25 crashed into the north side of the cloud-shrouded colossus. The pilot was Lieutenant Colonel William Smith, who had been decorated for flying 500 combat hours during WWII. He was on his way from Bedford Field outside of Boston to Newark Airport to pick up his commanding officer. Mistakenly, the control tower at La Guardia Airport gave him clearance to fly to Newark over Manhattan. The pilot's last words were: "From where I'm sitting I can't see the top of the Empire State Building."
