Either Small Planes Are Too Dangerous Or Our Parks Are Too Underutilized

Fortunately, no one actually uses Brooklyn’s Dreier-Offerman Park:

His small plane sputtering in the skies above Brooklyn, a New Jersey pilot played Capt. Cool yesterday and landed the Cessna right smack in the middle of a city park.

“It was a walk in the park,” Paul Dudley said after calmly guiding the faltering single-engine plane onto a field at Drier Offerman Park in Gravesend.

“This was tailor-made,” the 51-year-old pilot said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better place to land — except an airport.”

. . .

Police said no one was hurt in what Dudley, the director of the Linden Municipal Airport in New Jersey, shrugged off as a “big nothing.”

Frightened local residents said they saw the plane putt-putting low over the tops of buildings just across a creek from Coney Island.

“It sounded like he was in trouble — I thought it would crash,” said Ida DeGorter, who works at a local bus depot. “It came right over the garage. It came so low, we could see the pilot.”

Federal Aviation Administration officials will investigate the cause of the emergency landing.

Dudley, who has houses in the Hamptons and Staten Island, was flying the 28-year-old Cessna alone from Westhampton, L.I., to Linden when the engine started giving out as he neared Coney Island.

Instead of continuing across New York Harbor, he searched for a safe place to land.

“I didn’t want to risk taking it across the water,” he said. “I saw this open field of grass and decided to land it.”

Dudley touched down near several soccer fields and skidded to a halt after rolling about 150 feet.