Flying in unfamiliar airspace can be intimidating.
Personally, I’ve never flown as pilot-in-command on the east coast north of Florida. So the idea of flying around New York City is pretty daunting.
A new post on the Lightspeed Aviation website includes a video by Aviation101’s Josh Flowers about flying the Hudson River Corridor.
“You’ll be flying a VFR corridor called the East River Special Flight Rules Area (SFRA) through this Class B airspace, passing between 4 major airports (Newark, JFK, LaGuardia and Teterboro) without talking to ATC, so preparation is key.”
Like most things in life, if you slow down enough to read the rules and instructions, most things make sense.
This little bit of airspace is no exception.
I hope you enjoy the video more than the back seat passenger appeared to enjoy the flight.
In the early 70’s when Lease-a-plane was still operating as a business a pilot could checkout at one hub location and then in the same type of aircraft qualify to rent a plane at another hub location with only a short ground orientation interview. I got my pilots license in the Washington DC area and had about 300 hours flight time. While on a work assignment in NYC a fellow engineer and I decided to rent a Cessna 182 and fly along the railroad lines to get an areal view of our project which was providing radio communication service to the trains.
We rented the 182 at the FBO at Teterboro who was a Lease-a-plane hub and flew up to White Plains then used the Hudson VFR corridor to fly down the river and around the Statue of Liberty and back up the river. I remember being white knuckled on the control yoke as we were about 1200 agl and there were float planes crossing the river back and forth at about 400 to 500 agl below us and a constant stream of airliners a few thousand feet above us. As we approached the George Washington Bridge it looked like we were low but ended up passing 500 feet above the towers of the bridge My passenger a fellow engineer was not a pilot and had only flown on airliners prior to this and he was white as a ghost the entire trip.
AS I REMEMBER THE ILS13 APPROACH UP THE HUDSON AT 4000 THEN VECTORS OF ESSENTIALLY A LEFT 270 TURN TO INTERCEPT LOC TO RY13. VFR RIVER APPROACH TO RY13 A/C TO REMAIN AT OR ABOVE 2000 UP THE HUDSON ‘TIL RIGHT TURN FINAL TO RY13……
It’s no big deal but you will be flying very low, around 1200 feet if I remember correctly. If they are using runway 13 at LGA the airliners will be coming up the Hudson at 4000’.