On Monday, the National Transportation Safety Board made flight restrictions implemented after the crash of Cory Lidle's single engine plane on October 11, 2006, permanent. 

After the accident, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily ordered small, fixed wing planes not to fly over the river, which runs along Manhattan's East Side, unless the pilot would be in contact with air traffic controllers.

According to the NTSB documents, the Federal Aviation Administration on Dec. 12 "indicated that they would be proceeding with a rule making action to make the restrictions ...
permanently effective."

The restriction remains in place, an FAA spokesman said Monday, but could not immediately confirm that the agency plans to make the rule permanent.

Small planes could previously fly below 1,100 feet along the river without filing flight plans or checking in with air traffic control. Lidle's plane had flown between 500 and 700 feet above the river."

Source: ESPN

In spite of what transpired approximately five years prior on September 11, 2001, officials waited until the Lidle accident to implement flight restrictions around Manhattan.  The overwhelming police presence at the Lidle crash site did little to quell concerns that post 9/11 efforts have been focused on implementing a police state, not preventing similar attacks.

The NTSB found no mechanical defects with Lidle's airplane:

"The NTSB released on Monday the results of the investigation into the October 11 crash into a high-rise apartment building in New York.  The plane's propeller and engine were operating normally, and there was no sign of an in-flight fire or damage to the plane, the report said."

Source: CNN

Lidle himself described how he would handle a similar scenario:

" Mr. Lidle himself seemed to take such comfort. In an interview in The New York Times last month, he said: "Ninety-nine percent of pilots that go up never have engine failure, and the 1 percent that do usually land it. But if you’re up in the air and something goes wrong, you pull that parachute, and the whole plane goes down slowly."

It worked that way for Ilan K. Reich of Manhattan, who used the chute on his Cirrus SR22 to bring it down in a Hudson River inlet just north of Manhattan in 2005. Even Mr. Reich, a veteran pilot, said he never flew low over the East River because he considered it too dangerous."

Source: NY Times

-tdm