Two plane crashes in the same area of the East River both involved the same pilot and passenger, just six years apart.<\/p>\n
In the most recent crash, nobody on board was badly hurt. But that wasn’t the case when a plane with the same man at the controls went down in 2020.<\/p>\n
Just before 9:30 a.m. Saturday, the\u00a0FDNY rescued a pilot and a passenger of a small plane that went down in the water near the Throgs Neck Bridge in Whitestone. There\u2019s speculation it might have been caused by hitting a rogue wave. There were no injuries reported, and the plane was later pulled out of the water.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The man piloting the seaplane was Joe Oppedisano, who owns Il Bacco restaurant in Queens. He also was the pilot behind another crash in Oct. 2020 that proved deadly.<\/p>\n
He and the same passenger who was on board Saturday were critically hurt when his Cessna single-engine airplane went down in Whitestone that year. But in that incident, another passenger, Maggie O\u2019Neill, died.<\/p>\n
Witnesses said the plane was traveling along the water, skipped twice, and hit a pier. Oppedisano suffered a broken ankle and 16 fractured ribs. He underwent several surgeries.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Oppedisano\u2019s daughter said Monday afternoon that her father was doing OK.<\/p>\n
The National Transportation Safety Board found the probable cause of the 2020 crash to be due to the “pilot’s decision.” The federal agency is not said to be involved in the more recent incident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two plane crashes in the same area of the East River both involved the same pilot and passenger,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":268658,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-268657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268657\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/268658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}