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November 15, 2006
Pilot of Plane in Trouble Finds Safe Place to Land in a Brooklyn Park
By MICHAEL WILSON
The builders of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge probably saved someone’s life yesterday. They needed a place to dump all the displaced dirt from its construction, and ended up creating a new hunk of land that jutted out of Brooklyn into Coney Island Creek like a hitchhiker’s thumb.
In 1962, that land became part of a city park. Yesterday, it became an impromptu runway for Paul P. Dudley, a pilot, by being in the right place — under him — at the right time when his plane’s engine quit.
“There was no engine,” said John Lloyd, one of three fishermen who saw the small Cessna 172 coming in. “The plane was off.”
Mr. Dudley made an emergency landing in Calvert Vaux Park shortly after 10:30 a.m., touching down in an empty field and taxiing about 100 yards before crossing a small berm and coming to a stop, man and machine undamaged. The cause of the engine trouble is under investigation.
Mr. Dudley was traveling to Linden Airport in New Jersey from Westhampton Beach Airport on southeastern Long Island, about a 100-mile trip that he said takes 35 to 40 minutes in a Cessna. He works as a manager at the airport in Linden, in Union County. He said he has been flying this route for about 20 years.
“It’s akin to getting a blowout with your car on the highway,” he said last night. “This was a nonevent.”
Mr. Dudley, 51, who said he lived in homes on both Staten Island and Long Island, said that the plane’s problem was mechanical. He added that workers found about eight gallons of fuel in the Cessna’s tank after the landing, so despite speculation by some people at the scene, being out of gas was not the cause.
The tracks of the Cessna left creases in the taller-than-average grass where people from Coney Island, Gravesend and Brighton Beach in Brooklyn can sometimes be found playing a pickup game of football.
“I detected something wrong with the airplane, and rather than risk going across the water and maybe or maybe not making it, this was the closest available field,” Mr. Dudley told reporters in the park, near 27th Avenue and Shore Parkway in Brooklyn. “You’re trained to look for places to land. That’s all there is to it.”
Later, he added: “If you have a good spot and an empty spot, you take it. You don’t take the chance of kids playing ball in the next field.”
The three friends from Coney Island were fishing for striped bass nearby in the creek when they witnessed the landing. They said they could tell he was in trouble because the wings were tipping back and forth. What was worse, they added, was that the plane was producing no sound.
“He needed to buy $10 of gas,” said Ernell Gomez, one of the fisherman.
Mr. Lloyd, who was fishing with Mr. Gomez, said that he believed that the pilot was going to try a water landing. “Then he saw that soccer field and said, ‘Hey, I’m going to try this,’ ” Mr. Lloyd said.
One of the fishermen called 911 with a cellphone. It turned out they saw more than just the landing. They believed so strongly that they had seen the airplane strike a crane’s boom that they were certain the pilot was badly injured.
“How bad was he hurt? Is he pretty bad?” Mr. Lloyd asked a reporter. “Seems like the front of it would be pretty bad. You figure the pilot’s face hit the windshield, like a car.”
The men were surprised to hear that the pilot was fine.
“He’s definitely lucky,” Mr. Lloyd said.
Investigators from the Federal Aviation Administration said they planned to interview Mr. Dudley on Friday. The National Transportation Safety Board is not looking into the landing because it does not qualify as an accident.
A group of men spent more than four hours yesterday taking the wings off the Cessna so it could be loaded on a flatbed truck and carted to New Jersey. But the airplane’s wheels were stuck in the mud, and as darkness approached, Mr. Dudley hurried off to a nearby Home Depot for wooden planks.
A handful of nearby residents, attracted by the police helicopters, came by the park for a look. “Any landing is a good landing,” said Joe Barone, 62, himself a pilot.
Calvert Vaux Park, named in 1998 for the architect and one of the designers of Central Park, Prospect Park, Morningside Park and Fort Greene Park in the 1800s, is a little larger than 73 acres. Much of it was created from landfill from the bridge, according to the Parks Department. It was formerly known as the Dreier-Offerman Park, named for a home for unwed mothers and children that once stood on part of the property.
“Over here, they don’t do much,” said Ed Henry, who lives nearby. “I guess he picked a good place to land a plane. When I was a kid, this was all water. They took tons and tons of dump trucks full of dirt and dumped it here.”
Asked about the experience of landing in such a place, Mr. Dudley said, “Walk in the park.”
Ann Farmer and Patrick McGeehan contributed reporting.
