TWO minutes after he cleared a private plane for takeoff and a fateful flight over the Hudson River, an air traffic controller at New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport was on the phone with a woman in the airport operations office, joking about barbecuing a dead cat.

An air traffic controller was joking on the phone about barbecuing a dead cat moments before a light aircraft collided with a tour helicopter over the Hudson River, it has been revealed.

An air traffic controller on duty during last week’s deadly midair collision over New York’s Hudson River was talking on the phone at the time, safety officials said today.

Divers pulled a helicopter and four more bodies out of New York’s murky Hudson River in their search for victims, wreckage and explanations from the mid-air collision of a sightseeing helicopter and a light aircraft that killed nine people.

Two bodies have been recovered so far after a small plane collided with a tour helicopter over the Hudson River near Manhattan today.

THE pilot of US Airways Flight 1549, which ditched into New York’s Hudson River last month, calmly radioed to air traffic controllers: “We’re going to be in the Hudson.”

A black box recording of the moments leading up to the crash of a passenger jet in a New York river has revealed the pilot calmly announced “we are gonna be in the Hudson” before downing the plane in the icy waters.

Salvage crews have hoisted a US Airways jetliner from the Hudson River and onto a barge days after its pilot made a split-second decision to attempt a water landing to avoid a “catastrophic” crash over populated areas.

George Michael was forced to delay his flight to Boston, Massachusetts by one hour on Sunday - because rockers Sting and Bruce Springsteen were given priority by air traffic controllers.

A small plane slammed into a 40-storey apartment building in New York, killing two people in a crash that rained flaming debris onto the pavements and briefly raised fears of another terrorist attack.

A single-engine plane crashed into a high-rise building on New York’s Upper East Side high-rise today, killing four people, raining debris on the sidewalks below and rattling New Yorkers’ nerves exactly one month after the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attack.

A man in Newark, New Jersey, was today sentenced to two years’ probation for shining a laser pointer into the cockpit of a plane as it approached an airport, temporarily hampering its pilots’ vision.

A CORPORATE jet hurtled off the end of a runway yesterday while attempting to take off from Teterboro Airport, speeding across a highway and slamming into a warehouse.

A man charged with temporarily blinding the pilot and co-pilot of an executive jet with a laser beam claims he was simply using the device to look at stars with his seven-year-old daughter.