NEW YORK Investigators and workers in hard hats gathered up the scorched pieces of New York Yankee Cory Lidle's shattered plane at a luxury high-rise yesterday in a floor-by-floor sweep for clues to why the aircraft crashed.

The medical examiner's office removed the bodies Wednesday, but pieces of fuselage, a plane door and crushed vehicles still littered the street. Officials said aircraft parts and headsets were on the ground and investigators discovered the pilot's log book in the wreckage.

"No matter what's going on in your life, when you get up in that plane, everything's gone," Lidle told an interviewer with Comcast Sportsnet out of Philadelphia while flying his plane in April.