Nice article about flying around NYC

In the Saturday NY Times; flying the VFR areas around NYC in a T6 Texan.
Nicely written, and really evokes the experience of flying, and the more
unusual experience of flying low around NYC

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/ny...eat.html?8hpib

"Mr. Smith" wrote in message
news:lqWVc.165918$8_6.109356@attbi_s04...
In the Saturday NY Times; flying the VFR areas around NYC in a T6 Texan.
Nicely written, and really evokes the experience of flying, and the more
unusual experience of flying low around NYC

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/ny...eat.html?8hpib

and a short slide show:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/200...IDESHOW_1.html

I'm not a big fan of the Times but it's a fun piece made better by the
lack of terrorism-related paranoia. This is the sort of press we need
a lot more of.

-cwk.

For those who don't want to register just to see this.

Ray

Sky Above, Hubbub Below

August 22, 2004
By WENDELL JAMIESON





THE little airplane bobs and dips and yaws in the thermals
rising around the southern tip of Flatbush Avenue; you can
feel the warm air lifting the riveted aluminum wings. To
the right, Brooklyn is stretched out in the haze like a
diorama: the houses on Mill Basin with cabin cruisers tied
to their docks; the receding avenues; and in the distance,
the office buildings of Downtown Brooklyn. Beyond them,
Manhattan is two jagged mountain ranges - Wall Street and
Midtown.

Once the plane gets out over the shiny gray-green water,
the ride becomes smoother. Then the pilot dips the wings a
few degrees toward land, for a better look. Coney Island is
outside the canopy now. The plane is about the height of
the yellow tip of the Parachute Jump.

It's a hot morning - the weekday beach is surprisingly
crowded with little figures. Among them, someone must
notice this droning silvery anachronism flying by at the
aeronautical snail's pace of 120 miles per hour and know
what it is. Maybe it's an airplane-crazy little boy, or
maybe it's a man in his 80's who remembers training on one
during World War II and recognizes from his deep
subconscious the sound of its radial engine.

New York is a city of views: we seek them out, we pay more
for apartments that have them, we ask to be seated at the
rare table with one. We live and work and play down in the
city's warrens and crevices, but we like to see it from a
distance. New Yorkers go to the top of the Empire State
Building with relatives from out of town, gently mocking
them, and end up being more impressed than their guests. We
sit on a green wooden bench on the Brooklyn Heights
Promenade and take it all in. Businessmen, no matter how
jaded, look up from their laptops as their DC-10 soars
above Manhattan at 5,000 feet and admire for a moment their
workaholic arena below, spread out in an orange dusk like a
prickly carpet of geometric stalagmites.

But the best view of New York has got to be that from the
back seat of a 1943 North American T6 Texan just 200 feet
off the ground, going slow. This is the single-propeller
training plane in which tens of thousands of fighter and
bomber pilots first soloed 60 years ago. The view is 360
degrees - except for the part blocked by the back of the
pilot's head. Everywhere else, there is nothing but city
and water and sky.

This is not the high-flying businessman's city, beautiful
but lifeless, easily delineated. This is a living, animated
place; gaining altitude over the eastern tower of the
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, you feel like you can reach out
and grab it. Movement is all around: the cars crossing the
span, the nervous-making helicopters above and to the side,
the lumbering container ships with their infinite wakes.

The Texan is like a time machine of aviation. The world of
cellphones and the Internet and unfathomably complicated
computers does not exist. The roar of the engine seems to
drown out the new century. There's no place to plug in a
laptop. And it is clear what the pilot is doing because the
wires that control the rudder are visible inside the
fuselage, and because every time he leans to one side the
plane does, too.

His view, with all the workings of New York on display, is
a hard one to come by these days, at least since they
closed the Parachute Jump. Think of the city from the top
of a skyscraper. From 30 stories up, the only movement is
the ant people in their yellow ant taxicabs.

But from an eighth-floor apartment on, say, Union Street in
Park Slope, Brooklyn, homes and streets and windows are
animated, and the city is no less spectacular, a collection
of shapes - the steeple of the Old First Reformed Church on
Seventh Avenue, the circular dome of Temple Beth Elohim,
the noirish backs of the rectangular apartment buildings
facing Prospect Park, the necklace of lights on the
Verrazano.

This is what the city looked like from the first airplanes,
which were in a funny way linked to New York in the public
imagination - after all, skyscrapers and airplanes pierced
the sky at roughly the same time in history. Perhaps
nowhere is this connection made clearer than in the washy
brown ceiling mural at 30 Rockefeller Center: buildings
rise beneath flights of vapor-trailed monoplanes circling
forever upward.

The first person who saw New York from an airplane was
Wilbur Wright, in 1909. His first test flight was an
unannounced hop around the harbor, startling those who
happened to see it. Word spread; crowds crammed the
waterfront from Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan. Then he took
off again, going up to 200 feet, buzzing the Cunard liner
Lusitania.

Today, private planes are allowed to use a small corridor
of air from the Harbor up along the Hudson as long as they
don't go above 1,100 feet, the realm of the big jets.
Northbound planes must stay on the right side of the
Hudson, southbound planes on the left.

Flying just to the east of the Statue of Liberty in the
Texan at 1,000 feet gives what must be the closest
approximation of Wilbur Wright's experience that is legally
possible today, even though compared with Wright's open
biplane of canvas, wood and wires, the Texan is a modern
marvel. You are not really above the city, but in it, as in
that Union Street apartment (though higher).

Opening the canopy, buffeted by the slipstream, the
back-seat passenger has the sensation that the buildings
are the wooden-block creations of an unusually tall
8-year-old. As the plane travels up the Hudson, it is as if
the east-west cross streets of Manhattan are being fanned
for viewing pleasure. Down below, a ponderous white
Carnival cruise ship waits at a pier next to the aircraft
carrier Intrepid, which looks huge from the West Side
Highway but small and impossible to land on from right
above. And next to that is a truly incongruous sight: a
supersonic Concorde, sitting on a barge. It once rattled
window panes in Queens; now it is forever earthbound.

The public's response to Wright's harbor flights is
recorded, but one wonders what the pilot thought when he
became the first person to see New York this way. To this
taciturn Ohio native, did big, bad scary New York City
suddenly seem less threatening from a few hundred feet up?
Did it seem somehow manageable, even conquerable? It
certainly does today.

THREE minutes of low-altitude flight along the eastern
coastlines of Queens and Brooklyn present a remarkable
panorama of the city's aviation history. First, after being
granted special approval, the Texan buzzes Kennedy Airport.


The charcoal gray runways shoot into the haze like endless
parking lots, the big white jets lined up at either end.
(They seem so ungainly - unlike the Concorde - that it's
almost impossible to imagine that they can fly.) Baggage
carts snake to the terminals, and people movers in
different primary colors sit on the sidelines, awaiting
orders. The tracks of the new AirTrain tie everything
together like shoelaces. Eero Saarinen's Trans World
Airlines Flight Center looks even more like a bird about to
take flight than it does from the ground, its soaring form
suggesting movement as much as all the activity around it.

Then the Texan is over Jamaica Bay; the sandy and reedy
shores are lined with a ribbon of white, and then
blue-green water. The bay is shallow so it never turns dark
blue like the ocean on the other side of the Rockaways.
Then other runways come into focus. This is Floyd Bennett
Field, the city's first municipal airport, which takes up a
1,500-acre swath of landfill in eastern Brooklyn and was
opened by Mayor Jimmy Walker in 1931.

The disused runways are yellowing and crumbling. The
ancient hangars still stand, as does the old control tower,
but you can tell from above that they are rundown. A
green-bottomed swimming pool sits empty, its diving board
presumably no longer used, and massive circular foundations
of concrete mark the spots where gun batteries once stood.

This is where Howard Hughes landed after flying around the
world in 91 hours; where Douglas (Wrong Way) Corrigan took
off in a tiny Robin bound for California (or so he said)
and landed instead in Ireland; where fighters and bombers
took off to sweep the coast clear of U-boats or head to
Europe during World War II; and where the planes alighted
to shoot King Kong off the Empire State Building.

Then there is Coney Island, the faded amusement parks
colorful and not-so faded from above, and the
Soviet-looking apartment blocks just beyond. Then Brooklyn
curves around and flattens out into those endless avenues
fading into the haze, and the Verrazano comes into view.

FLYING in the Texan up the Hudson at an altitude lower than
the top of the Empire State Building, it's not so hard to
imagine how a B-25 Mitchell bomber slammed into it in July
1945. From the ground, with all that sky around the
building, it seems impossible. But up there you realize
that the air above Midtown is as crowded as the streets
below.

The occasional B-25 still visits New York, piloted down the
Hudson by some collector. For the inveterate plane spotter,
the skies offer other surprises. On clear summer days, for
instance, a group of fliers called the Skytypers bring
their Texans over the city in a line-abreast formation to
spell out in puffs of smoke advertising slogans and the
occasional marriage proposal.

The Skytypers live at Republic Airport in Farmingdale, Long
Island. Across the tarmac sits the American Airpower
Museum, which has a collection of flyable World War II
planes.

Among them is the Texan that recently flew a loop around
the city. That airplane is owned by an optician from Roslyn
Heights, Long Island, named Paul Farber. Mr. Farber takes
the plane up about once a week or so, tooling around Long
Island and the water around it. He doesn't usually fly over
the city. After the recent tour, he was asked why.

"There's no place to land if the engine quits," he said,
smiling.

He was thanked for not mentioning that before takeoff.

It
is a shame he stays away from the city, though, because
from 200 to 1,000 feet it has so much more to offer than
the leafy suburbs. Its energy is simultaneously revealed
and harnessed, and its buildings are taller than they seem
from the ground, bothering the sky, just like those in the
Rockefeller Center ceiling mural surrounded by that tornado
of ascending monoplanes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/ny...3b909c73324c75


On Sun, 22 Aug 2004 05:45:54 GMT, Mr. Smith wrote:

In the Saturday NY Times; flying the VFR areas around NYC in a T6 Texan.
Nicely written, and really evokes the experience of flying, and the more
unusual experience of flying low around NYC

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/22/ny...eat.html?8hpib

"Ray Bengen" writes:

For those who don't want to register just to see this.

Also try http://www.bugmenot.com/