The Corridor

We are descending through 3,000 feet over New Jersey, flying about 50 miles north of Atlantic City. The Jersey shoreline and the faded resort town of Asbury Park lie to our right—stomping

                                                         Sacha Botbol photo

grounds of the state’s second-favorite son, Bruce Springsteen (favorite-son status belonging, of course, to Frank Sinatra). Behind us lie the Pine Barrens and the former Lakehurst Naval Air Station with its three huge airship hangars—the largest, Hangar One, being the destination of the ill-fated zeppelin Hindenburg, which exploded while attempting to land there in 1937.

         Before us stretches Sandy Hook, the long spit of beach that juts into the entrance of New York Harbor near the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Outside the harbor, ships dot the surface of the water, waiting their turn to enter and dock. It is November, and though still early afternoon, the low, late-season sun slashes across the landscape, causing the skyline of Manhattan to glitter in the distance.

            Sitting copilot beside me is my brother, Charley. We’ve been flying together for our entire lives. First as passengers aboard our father’s single engine Piper Comanche and later as partners in our own Comanche. We’ve always been interested in airplanes. As kids, we built plastic models, collected flight schedules and used a telescope to identify airliners flying high over our house in Colorado Springs as they streaked en route to Chicago, New York or Los Angeles. Flying has been our joint obsession, a constant that has nurtured our relationship and been a touchstone to our childhood.

            Today we are returning from a flight to Georgetown, Delaware, a nearly 300-mile flight from our home airport just south of Boston.  By car the trip would be a more than 7-hour drive. Total flight time round-trip: just around 4 hours. We met up with some fellow pilots, had lunch, looked each other’s planes over, and are now returning. Even by “$100 hamburger” standards, it’s a bit extravagant, but such is the life of a recreational pilot. Without a real reason to fly, you sometimes have to make one up.

            But that is the magic of flying. It allows you to go anywhere, whenever, without the hassle of traffic or speed limits or detours; without security lines or missed connections or squeezing yourself into a middle seat. More than convenience, flying allows you to go places and do things that would be impractical and perhaps impossible by car. In a word, flying is freedom.

Crossing over the water near Sandy Hook, we are now at 1,100 feet as we prepare to turn toward Manhattan. In the distance, on the other side of the bay, the distinctive profile of a Boeing 747 lifts off a runway at Kennedy International Airport. The huge aircraft hardly seems to be moving—less flying than floating skyward. 

With three major commercial airports and more than two-dozen feeder and general aviation fields in the area, the airspace over New York is one of the most congested anywhere. Despite this, the Federal Aviation Administration carved out a narrow strip of airspace underlying the giant New York Control Area. From the Tappan Zee Bridge near Westchester running down the Hudson River to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, aircraft flying below 1,300 feet can transit the area or tour the city.

I remember how intimidating the idea of flying the Hudson River Corridor was as a new pilot—the narrowness of the passage, the proximity of the buildings and swarms of aircraft—all of it seemed like a suicide run. 

The corridor, however, is rather ingeniously constructed. A set of mandatory rules keeps aircraft both separated and alert to the whereabouts of other aircraft. Like a highway, aircraft flying the corridor keep to the right side of the river. Helicopters generally keep below 500 feet. Sightseeing aircraft keep below 999 feet, and transiting aircraft fly between 1,000 and 1,300 feet. Airspeed is restricted to 140 knots or less. All exterior lights are to be illuminated, and all aircraft are required to report over a common frequency of their altitude, direction of flight, type of aircraft, and when abeam a series of designated landmarks: the “VZ” (Verrazano Narrows Bridge), “the Lady” (Statue of Liberty), “the Clock” (Goldman Sachs tower), the Intrepid (Air Museum), the GW (George Washington Bridge).

In the decades since it was established, there has been only one mid-air collision in the corridor. And except for instances of incompetent piloting by famous baseball players or catastrophically disabled airliners needing a place to ditch, flying the corridor is really no more stressful than flying into an uncontrolled airport.

For passengers, flying the corridor is one of the great spectacles in aviation, a view of the city that you can’t get from an airliner or the most expensive penthouse suite on Manhattan. 

From the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, lower Manhattan looms like the prow of a gigantic ship. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island look like tiny outcrops in the expansive harbor.  At 1,000 feet, you are flying below the tops of many buildings, close enough that it seems you could almost reach out and touch them; the streets appear as narrow pathways between walls of concrete and steel, and the West Side Highway a river of light as the afternoon rush begins—half white,  half red.  The city in miniature slides past—the Empire State Building, Times Square, Central Park and Yankee Stadium.

Near the Tappan Zee Bridge, we turn eastbound toward home, flying inland along the coast of Connecticut near the cities of Bridgeport, New Haven and Groton, places I have flown in and out of over the years in my continual search for new places to fly, or flying to old places for new reasons. 

I contact New York Approach to get traffic advisories en route. “Standby,” the controller says gruffly. The afternoon rush is starting for him, also. The radio crackles with the transmissions of all manner of aircraft moving in and out of the area: airliners going into Kennedy or LaGuardia, business jets landing at Teterboro or Westchester, military aircraft en route to Stewart or Westover air reserve bases and all manner of small aircraft criss-crossing the skies. Often New York controllers are too busy to accept you. This time, I’m lucky. The controller gives me a four-digit transponder code that will identify me on his radar screen.

With one ear attuned to air traffic control to listen for traffic calls or a frequency change, my brother and I chat about work, our families, our last vacation or our plans for the holidays. But mostly we chat about flying. We talk about trips we took when we were kids, or trips we plan to take together in the future. We talk about our dream plane or how much our father would have enjoyed this flight today.

The sun, low to the horizon, bathes the landscape in a golden hue. To the north you can see the outline of the Green Mountains in southern Vermont. To the south the Connecticut coastline and Long Island Sound, the island itself and the Atlantic Ocean beyond.  The Connecticut River appears as a foil ribbon as it winds toward Hartford and western Massachusetts.

“New York Approach, This is November Four Five Four Eight Sierra, I, uh, I’m having engine trouble…”


Our distracted banter stops and our attention instantly returns to the cockpit. The controller asks for the pilot to repeat the plane’s tail number, the nature of the problem, and whether she can continue to her destination?

“No… I need to land. Can you vector me to the nearest airport?”

The controller names a nearby field and gives her a bearing.

“I, ah… How far?”

The controller repeats the information. My brother and I look at each other. This isn’t good.

“I, ah, can’t see,” the pilot says, breathing heavily. “The sun’s in my eyes. Oh God! Can you give me vectors?”

The controller again gives her the distance and bearing to the field, his voice seemingly becoming more deliberate and calm in reaction to her deepening panic.

“Twelve o’clock and four miles? The sun’s too bright. I can’t see anything. “

She seems unable to hear the controller, or perhaps too gripped by panic to react. The airfield, the controller says, is right in front of her.

“How far? I need a vector!”

The controller tells her she’s less than two miles away. It’s right in front of her.

“No. I can’t see it.”

The controller again gives her the distance and bearing.

“Where? Oh God. All I see is trees.”

“Shirley!” another voice breaks over the radio. “Switch tanks.”

The unknown voice seems to know who the pilot is. He also knows that the likeliest reason the engine quit running is that it ran out of gas, and that the pilot may not have the presence of mind to realize she simply needs to reach down and switch to the other fuel tank.

“What? Who’s that? New York? Four-Eight-Sierra. New York?”

The controller is calling her, but it’s not clear she can hear him. Below a certain altitude he will lose communications. He asks for her altitude.

“I’m, uh, at fifteen-hundred feet. Oh, God!”

There’s a pause.

“New York! New Yooork!”

And then silence. My brother and I look at each other, dumbfounded by what we just heard.

 “New York, this is Two-Niner-Echo—a friend of Four-Eight Sierra. We’d like to stay in the area to be of assistance locating her.”

The controller acknowledges the request then gives me a frequency for Bradley Approach. My brother and I hardly say a word to each other for the 20-minute flight home.

The next day, I learn that the woman survived. A resident splitting wood in his backyard heard the snapping of branches as the plane hit trees behind his property. The plane came to rest inverted, wedged between branches about 10 feet off the ground. The homeowner grabbed a ladder and climbed up to the cockpit and discovered the pilot conscious and responsive. Rescuers later lowered her by rope to an awaiting ambulance.

Investigators later found that the fuel selector was set to the left fuel tank, which was empty, while the right fuel tank had 15 gallons of fuel in it.

There’s an old saying: “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.” The problem in aviation is that the multitude of things that can go wrong and the consequences of which are so dire that a pilot can’t afford to learn from his mistakes. It’s why we tend to pore over accident reports to try and learn from the mistakes of other pilots, to put ourselves in the place of the unfortunate pilot.

For when it comes to flying, fear is a natural reaction to an unnatural act. No matter how routine and sterile the airlines can make flying seem, the hurtling of bodies through the air will always be inherently dangerous. Fear respects this fact, and I’ve come to embrace it. Fear keeps me focused. Fear makes me alert. I know the day I become blasé about flying is the day I need to give it up.