At 9:40 on a foggy Saturday morning in July 1945, an Army bomber flew into the north face of the Empire State Building.

Minutes later, an elevator attendant named Betty Lou Oliver, 20 years old by Guinness’s account, was in a car that dropped 75 stories into the basement. She was pulled out alive, and the record book still lists her.

This is what the documents show, minute by minute, and what the shaft did to keep her breathing.

9:40 a.m., July 28, 1945

The aircraft was a North American B-25 Mitchell, tail number 41-30577, nicknamed “Old John Feather Merchant.”

It had left Bedford Army Air Field in Massachusetts, bound for Newark Metropolitan Airport in New Jersey.

At the controls was Lieutenant Colonel William Franklin Smith Jr. of Watertown, Massachusetts, who had flown 1,000 combat hours with the 457th Bomb Group and held the Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Croix de Guerre.

Manhattan was under thick fog. Smith was advised of zero visibility before he came in over the city.

He never saw the tower. The bomber struck the north side of the building high up, punching an opening measured at 18 feet by 20 feet across the 78th to 80th floors.

Time’s account of the crash places the offices that took the hit, and the women who worked in them, on the 79th floor.

What the engines did

A building strike is not one event. It is the aircraft, and then it is the pieces.

One engine tore straight through the structure and out the south side. It cleared the next block and dropped 900 feet before it came down.

The second engine went somewhere far more consequential. It fell into an elevator shaft, and on the way down it severed the cables.

Fourteen people died: three crew members aboard the bomber and eleven people who were inside the building that morning. The floors the bomber hit held the offices of War Relief Services and the National Catholic Welfare Council.

Property damage was put at about $1 million in 1945 money, a figure the standard reference now converts to roughly $18 million in 2025 dollars.

The fire was out inside 40 minutes. The building was open for business on many floors the following Monday morning, less than 48 hours later.

The second accident, during the rescue

Betty Lou Oliver was working an elevator on the 80th floor when the bomber hit.

The blast threw her out of her car with severe burns. First-aid workers reached her and needed to get her down to the street.

They put her into another elevator.

That car’s cables were among the ones the falling engine had cut.

The car went down the shaft the full 75 stories, more than 1,000 feet, and hit the basement.

Why the basement did not kill her

Two things, in the Guinness account, likely stood between Betty Lou Oliver and a straight terminal fall.

The first was air. Guinness records the car being slowed “by air pressure within the relatively airtight shaft.”

The second was the wreckage of the thing that caused the fall. The severed cables had been dropping into the shaft ahead of the car, and they had gathered at the bottom in a loose spiral.

Guinness World Records describes the result plainly: the impact at the bottom was “cushioned by severed cables piling up in a spring-like spiral on the floor.”

On Guinness’s account, the engine that cut her cables is also the reason there was something spring-like at the bottom of her shaft.

What it cost her

Rescuers found her conscious in the wreck of the car. They had to cut her out of it.

She had a broken neck, a broken back and a broken pelvis, on top of the burns from the 80th floor.

She was taken to Bellevue Hospital and stayed there four months, then recuperated for several more at an aunt’s house in Arkansas before going home.

Guinness lists the fall as the longest survived in an elevator. It has stood since 1945, which by the time Guinness wrote it up on October 13, 2023 was 78 years without a challenger.

Betty Lou Oliver raised three children, and died on November 24, 1999, at the age of 74, fifty four years after the fall.

The rule the crash helped write

Insurance stories usually end at the claim. This one ends at a statute.

In 1945 there was no general way for a private citizen to sue the federal government for the negligence of its employees. The government’s own bomber had flown into a private office building, and the doctrine of sovereign immunity stood in the way of the people it hit.

Congress had been working on the problem for years. The Federal Tort Claims Act was signed into law by President Harry S. Truman in August 1946, thirteen months after the crash, and it opened the courthouse door.

The Encyclopedia.com legal history entry on the Act puts the crash in the causal chain: the victims found “that the most obvious party to sue (the United States) was immune from liability,” and one year later “the victims of the Empire State Building crash were among the first to bring suit under the new statute.”

A building took a bomber and reopened on Monday. A woman took a 1,000-foot fall and lived another 54 years. And the year after, the country wrote down what happens when the government’s aircraft is the thing that lands on someone.

The Guinness entry, the reference article and the legal history entry are linked in Sources below.