Fly Downtown by Anne Kadet For the cost of dinner and a movie, anyone can experience the thrill of piloting a plane down the Hudson River and seeing Lower Manhattan in a whole new way. Air Fleet Training, a flight school run out of New Jersey’s Teterboro Airport, offers a $49 “discovery flight” —an hour in the sky at the controls of a Cessna four-seater. Air Fleet, of course, hopes that one lesson will get you so hooked that you’ll take out a second mortgage in pursuit of a pilot’s license. But for someone like myself—stupidly curious but scared of just about everything in general and of flying in particular, there would be no chance of developing an addiction. In the cockpit, I am introduced to a pair of giant headphones and the tinny voice of a flight controller, who gives us instructions for taxiing. Stoll, sitting to my right with his own set of controls, lets me steer the plane on the ground, which is done using the foot pedals. I feel like I’m driving a church organ, and our craft weaves from one side of the strip to the other. At the traffic controller’s command, I turn onto the runway. Stoll pushes in the throttle and we hurtle down the runway. Quickly, Stoll takes control and the little plane speeds faster. Stoll pulls back on the wheel and we’re airborne. I yelp like a cocker spaniel as the ground falls away, and hear nothing of the instructor’s lesson on climbing. What am I doing 400, 600, 900 feet up, in this tin can? Then we level off and the scene opens before us—the glittering city stretched out ahead, the gray-green cold of the Hudson shimmering below, pedestrian Jersey sprawling to the right. We have the sky to ourselves as we head south down the river. We’re flying at 120 miles an hour, but it feels more like floating. At 1,000 feet, we sail past Lower Manhattan, only occasionally jostled by little eddies in the wind. It’s like riding inside a giant bee. “Why don’t you circle around and head back up the Hudson?” says Stoll. The obvious answer, “Because I will surely kill us all,” is lost as I fumble for the controls and, still using my feet on the rudder pedals, steer the plane in a wide tilting arc, sweeping past Brooklyn and circling back toward the river. The plane keeps climbing above the legal limit of 1,000 feet and Stoll, ever so gently, reminds me to push on the wheel and lower the nose, thus avoiding trouble with Federal authorities. Taking us up the east side of the river, I see the wall of skyscrapers in Battery Park City and the World Financial Center that rise like a shield protecting the city, the astonishing amount of acreage of the World Trade Center site, and Tribeca’s low sturdy squares, tucked close to Independence Plaza and the Travelers building. As we buzz toward the George Washington Bridge and I am finally getting the hang of steering with my feet, Stoll calmly informs me that when airborne, you use the steering wheel. Now letting my hands do the work, we zoom to the Tappan Zee Bridge, where Stoll says to take the plane up to 2,500 feet. I pull back on the wheel and the plane tilts into the darkening sky. “Take it wherever you want,” Stoll offers, and I head west toward the setting sun. I am disappointed when Stoll tells me to aim for the bright lights of Giants Stadium, and back to Teterboro. As we descend, the gray suburbs of North Jersey greet us as if to say: Yeah, you had your fling with the Manhattan skyline, welcome back to Earth. Then, all too soon, the airstrip glides in beneath us as Stoll gifts us with a gentle landing. Once out of the cockpit, the fact of what just happened seems unimaginable. I look at the sky and think, I was up there. Taking the bus back to Port Authority, the city rises into view and I think, I was flying over this, like a drunken seagull. And then the realization: I want to do it again. For more information on introductory flights, go to www.beapilot.com or call 888-BE-A-PILOT.