Welcome to Floyd Bennett Field, New York city's first municipal airport. The terminal is currently
closed to the public but we're going to go inside and have a look around, so come on in.
My name is Lincoln Hallowell, I'm a National Park Service ranger at Gateway National Recreation Area
There's a lot of aviation history here at Floyd Bennett field,
people like Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Doolittle, Jacqueline Cochran,
Roscoe Turner, Howard Hughes all made record-breaking flights here.
Air travel back in the 1930s was quite glamorous, there was meal service,
there were sleeper planes. You would fly wearing your best clothes because it was news.
Right here is where you would have purchased your ticket.
You would have then gone down these stairs, a very real problem of air travel in those days
was people walking into spinning propellers, the tunnels were built to keep people from
walking in front of the airplane so that they could walk underground directly into the aircraft.
Control tower would control the air traffic in and around Floyd Bennett field, usually
people are not allowed out onto the balcony but we're going to make an exception this one time.
To the Southeast we got broad channel and the rockaway peninsula,
to the east you've got Jamaica bay, to the North here we've got
the rest of Brooklyn and way off in the distance the Manhattan skyline.
Hangar B houses our historic aircraft collection. There's a lot of history at Floyd Bennett field
but just one site of a much larger aviation story within the national park system.
Welcome to the Wright brothers bicycle shop. This was their neighborhood,
this is where they lived, where they worked, where they grew up. The family home was located about a
block from here and so really more than any other spot this truly is the birthplace of aviation,
it's where the thought process began. There were several people in different parts of the world
looking to become the first to successfully fly an airplane but the Wright brothers had an advantage,
they realized that to turn an airplane you had to bank into the turn like a bicycle. The
Wright brothers really did their research and they determined that the outer banks of North Carolina
had the ideal sand dunes and steady winds where they could test the first airplane.
Wilbur and Orville Wright did their gliding experiments here but those experiments
didn't go very well. In 1901 Wilbur turned to Orville and said that "never in a thousand
years would man fly." thankfully though Wilbur and Orville's determination kept them motivated enough
to come back to the outer banks and try again. As Orville's in the air the five locals who'd showed
up to help the brothers that day were cheering them on, Wilbur had been running alongside the
flyer and then finally after about 12 seconds in the air Orville lands right about here.
Now at that point by anybody's standards Wilbur and Orville Wright have successfully achieved
flight and once this happened the flight rapidly advanced. from there. By 1914 you've got planes
being used in world war one,. In the 1920s you have pilots who make transatlantic flights.
In the 1940s Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier while Orville's still alive.
One of the things about these pioneering aviators was the incredible danger
that they were facing, when you're advancing technology a lot of what you're testing is
experimental you don't know right away if it's going to work and sometimes it didn't.
But if you think about the timeline from the Wright brothers first flight to
the first steps on the moon it's less than 66 years.
That's less than a lifetime for a lot of people and it's all part of the same story.
Floyd Bennett field is an incredible resource to not just the people of New York but to the
American people. It's a place where you can have an entire national park service experience.
We have incredible natural resources, recreational resources, and of course the history.
When this was still an active naval air station we would drive by here on our way to the beach of
course I'm thinking, "this has to be the coolest place in the world!" well you know here I am.
I guess the you know the little boy in me still thinks this is the coolest place on earth.