Space shuttle arrives in NYC; crowds watch in awe

Space shut­tle Enter­prise, rid­ing on the back of the NASA 747 Shut­tle Car­rier Air­craft per­forms a fly-by above JFK Inter­na­tional Air­port, Fri­day, in New York. Enter­prise is even­tu­ally going to make its new home in New York City at the Intre­pid Sea, Air and Space Museum. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

MEGHAN BARR

Asso­ci­ated Press

NEW YORK — In a city under­stand­ably wary of low-flying air­craft, New York­ers and tourists alike watched with joy and excite­ment Fri­day as space shut­tle Enter­prise sailed over the sky­line on its final flight before it becomes a museum piece.

Ten years after 9/11, peo­ple gath­ered on rooftops and the banks of the Hud­son River to mar­vel at the sight of the space­craft rid­ing pig­gy­back on a mod­i­fied jumbo jet that flew over the Statue of Lib­erty and past the sky­scrap­ers along Manhattan’s West Side.

“It made me feel empow­ered. I’m going to start cry­ing,” Jen­nifer Pat­ton, a tourist from Can­ton, Ohio, said after the plane passed over the cheer­ing crowd on the deck of the air­craft car­rier USS Intre­pid, the float­ing air-and-space museum that will be the shuttle’s per­ma­nent home.

“I just feel like to have a plane fly that low over the Hud­son, right past New York City, and to have every­one cheer­ing and excited about it, shows that we don’t have fear, that we have a sense of ‘This is ours.’”

Onlook­ers bun­dled up on the blus­tery spring day along the piers on the West Side, cam­eras slung around their necks. The roar of the air­craft could barely be heard over the howl­ing winds. In truth, the cam­era angles on TV made it seem as if the shut­tle was a lot closer to the build­ings than it really was.

The low-altitude flight was well-publicized, and few peo­ple were caught off-guard. Not one per­son called 911 to report a low-flying plane, police said.

That’s a strik­ing con­trast to what hap­pened in 2009 when the Pen­ta­gon con­ducted a photo-op fly­over in lower Man­hat­tan by a pas­sen­ger jet and F-16 fighter. The sight of the air­craft fly­ing past the Statue of Lib­erty and lower Manhattan’s finan­cial dis­trict set off a flood of 911 calls and sent office work­ers rush­ing into the streets in panic.

On Fri­day, the jet car­ry­ing the shut­tle turned east and flew over cen­tral Long Island. Nas­sau County office work­ers looked out their win­dows in delight as it passed over the Roo­sevelt Field Mall, near the spot where Charles Lind­bergh took off for Paris in 1927.

The shut­tle then touched down at Kennedy Air­port, where a con­troller radioed: “Wel­come to New York, and thanks for the show.”

The shut­tle will be taken to the Intre­pid by barge in June and is sched­uled to open to the pub­lic in mid-July.

Enter­prise never went on an actual space mis­sion; it was a full-scale test vehi­cle used for flights in the atmos­phere and exper­i­ments on the ground.

It comes to New York as part of NASA’s deci­sion to end the shut­tle pro­gram after 30 years.

Space shut­tle Dis­cov­ery flew over the nation’s cap­i­tal last week and will end up at the Smith­son­ian. Endeavor is going to Los Ange­les, and Atlantis is stay­ing at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.

Posted by AP News on Apr 27 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.