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What the two pilots were doing was flying in a VFR corridor below Class B airspace. As long as you stay below 1,100 feet and over the Hudson or East rivers, you don't need to be talking to ATC at all. What they were doing was perfectly legal and safe, although in this particular case something went wrong.
Nobody bats an eye that helicopters fly in and around NYC all the freakin time, but as soon as someone famous crashes everyone is up in arms about planes flying so low and "Think of the children!! Won't someone think of the children!!"
This whole situation is retarded, because you have a lot of non aviation types talking about what should be and what should not be in regards to flying. Yes it was bad that the plane crashed into a building, but it was an accident. It was not on purpose.
However, leave it to the FAA and NTSB to pass judgments on what is safe and what is not. You can regulate everything to high hell, but things will still happen and planes will still fall out of the sky. Regulating everything under the sun does not necessarily make things safer, because people are people and accidents will always happen.
And yes, you can fly low over cities everywhere in the US. Small aircraft do it all the time. Planes go down all the time, but you never hear about it until they have a fucking celebrity onboard and then everyone turns into a safety expert and armchair pilot.
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