single-engine plane carrying the Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle smashed into a 42-story building on the Upper East Side yesterday, killing Mr. Lidle and his flight instructor, the authorities said.

The afternoon crash beneath overcast skies sent debris clattering hundreds of feet to the sidewalk and started a fire that destroyed several apartments and left a charred smudge on the face of the building. Fourteen firefighters and four people in the building were injured, officials said, including a woman who had been in an apartment hit squarely by the plane and escaped the inferno, suffering burns. The plane, owned by Mr. Lidle, was a Cirrus SR20, a four-seat propeller plane that is popular for its performance and sleek looks. It has a fixed landing gear reminiscent of a stunt plane. With two sets of controls, officials said, either Mr. Lidle or his instructor could have been flying it.

Debbie Hersman, a spokeswoman for the National Transportation Safety Board, said today in a televised interview that investigators had found Mr. Lidle’s flying logbook amid the rubble. She said it showed that Mr. Lidle had recorded over 80 hours in the air, more than half of them as pilot in command. But she said that did not mean that he was necessarily in control at the time of the crash.

It slammed into the center of a 501-foot building on East 72nd Street several hundred yards from the East River. New Yorkers with memories of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center watched smoke drifting toward the sky as firefighters clambered into another high-rise, and the North American Aerospace Defense Command scrambled military jets. Some worried that they had witnessed another terrorist attack, but officials quickly dismissed that notion.

Mr. Lidle, 34, a pilot for less than a year who was traded to the Yankees in the summer, had talked enthusiastically about flying to his home in California this week.

As he cleaned out his locker at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, the day after the Yankees’ playoff hopes fizzled in a series loss in Detroit against the Tigers, he said that he planned to work on instrument training exercises yesterday before he left for California, and that his regular instructor, whom he identified as Tyler Stanger, was coming in to work with him. Officials said they believed that Mr. Stanger was the second victim.

The plane took off from Teterboro Airport in New Jersey about 2:30 p.m., according to a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said it circled the Statue of Liberty before heading north by the East River. Radar contact was lost around the Queensboro Bridge. He said it was not clear why the plane veered toward Manhattan, apparently after traveling farther north, and hit the building on the north side about 12 minutes after takeoff. The plane never got higher than 800 feet, according to Passur, a flight-tracking service. Pilots describe that area of the East River as a particularly treacherous corridor that tends to be crowded with helicopters. Several witnesses said the plane appeared to be in trouble moments before it crashed. One investigator said initial reports indicated that the aircraft had radioed La Guardia Airport to say that it was running low on fuel.

The plane disintegrated as it hit the building, shaking bricks loose from the faade, and ended up as a smoking wreckage on the street. “The engine with the propeller was two feet inside the window,” another investigator said, adding that much of the rest of the plane had fallen to the street outside the building, at 524 East 72nd Street.

The plane bore into an apartment on the 30th floor, which under the building’s numbering system is Apt. 40ABG. Dr. Parviz Benhuri, who owns the apartment with his wife, Ilana, said she was at home when the plane blasted through the window and the apartment went up in flames. “She told me she saw the window come out and the fire comes,” he said. “She told me she saw the window coming out and she ran. She’s in shock. She’s lucky she made it. It’s a miracle.”

She ran down the stairs and went to the emergency room at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center a couple of blocks away.

Three other people walked down from lower floors and were treated for exhaustion, one city official said. Other witnesses said that the sequence of events leading to the crash unfolded so quickly that they realized only later that noises they had heard must have come from Mr. Lidle’s plane.“It sounded like a truck gearing down,” said Kim Quarterman, a doorman at a nearby building. “Then I saw a cloud of smoke.”  Jeremy Chassen, a real estate developer who was in an apartment across the street, recognized the droning of an airplane engine — he has taken flight lessons himself.

Joanne Hartlaub, an actress and filmmaker who was working out in a gym across the street, heard explosions and a “loud whooshing noise, like something falling, very loud.”

She said she saw “this large object falling from the sky; it was aluminum and it was smoking.”