NYC Doctor, Two Others Killed In NJ Small Plane Crash

Just before 5:30 p.m. yesterday, a small private plane crashed near an airport in Fairfield, NJ, killing its three occupants, the pilot, Manhattan doctor Margaret Smith, 70, her stepson, Michael Ferguson, 44, and his wife Theresa. The Star-Ledger reports that the plane "crashed and burst into a fireball after an aborted landing at Essex County Airport." A witness said, "When the crash hit, you could tell it wasn’t a car. It was much louder than that." Smith was a professor at New York Medical College and had been a program director at St. Vincent's. The Post reports that Smith's plane, a Cirrus SR22 was "similar to the Cirrus that Yankee pitcher Corey Lidle and his instructor flew into an Upper East Side apartment building in 2006."

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By Jen Chung in News on July 6, 2010 10:11 AM

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Claire Buckley RN

Dr Margaret Smith was a Lady/Soft spoken/devoted to her patients/would always call + let the ED know she was sending someone over. As an ED RN with seniority 14 1/2 years she would often come to me + ask if I had an interesting patient that she could have her Medical Students from NYU interview + learn from. She taught/mentored/encouraged 100,S of potential + current MD,S. You will be trully missed. Claire Buckley.

jzny

I have close to 500 landings in my logbook at Caldwell/Essex County. There's a pretty good chance that she was planning to put down on RWY 04 at CDW, approached a little fast, declared a go-around, then couldn't get the a/c to climb away given the high density altitude that afternoon. IMHO, the CR22 is a little slippery by design at that point of the flight regime, so it would be interesting to know about the pilot's total experience - but honestly, the trees start to come up pretty fast at the departure end of RWY 04, combined with the fact that the controllers (since it's an ATC training tower) are really try to push a lot of traffic into the pattern. It can be a busy place, especially with all the interaction from LGA, EWR, JFK, and TEB. Definitely not a great place for low-time flyers, but hey, it's bad form for pilots to second guess what was going on up front, in the moment, so I'll shut up now.