{"id":1775,"date":"2006-11-15T09:30:18","date_gmt":"2006-11-15T17:30:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2006\/11\/either_small_planes_are_too_dangerous_or_our_parks_are_too_underutilized.html"},"modified":"2006-11-15T09:30:18","modified_gmt":"2006-11-15T17:30:18","slug":"either_small_pl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/11\/either_small_pl.html","title":{"rendered":"Either Small Planes Are Too Dangerous Or Our Parks Are Too Underutilized"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fortunately, no one actually uses Brooklyn’s Dreier-Offerman Park<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p>\n

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

. . .<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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

“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.”<\/p>\n

Federal Aviation Administration officials will investigate the cause of the emergency landing.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Instead of continuing across New York Harbor, he searched for a safe place to land.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

Dudley touched down near several soccer fields and skidded to a halt after rolling about 150 feet.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,50],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brooklyn","category-were_all_gonna_die"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}