Fire Island Airplane
We spent Saturday on Fire Island: some friends have a quarter share in Fair Harbor, and did the day trip thing of having some barbeque and spending time on the beach.
There must have been some sort of air show that weekend. While walking along the beach, we saw a trio of Great War biplanes performing mock dogfights over the ocean: mainly lazy turns to try to get on each other’s tail. They didn’t do corkscrews or loops or all the other maneuvers that I’m only familiar with from playing flight sims a long time ago.
Biplanes fly shockingly slow: all that lift keeps them up when other, more modern planes would have stalled. And they turn tightly. But with the speed they went at, you can see how fast monoplanes could have dove on them to win. I suppose biplanes existed because engine technology couldn’t deliver enough power in a small enough package to dispense with the extra lift from the second wing.
I don’t have pictures of the biplanes, but I did go back to the house to get my camera shortly after coming on a strange sight: a World War 2 era monoplane stuck on the beach.
This was perhaps a half mile west of Fair Harbor. I’m not sure what kind of plane it was, perhaps a trainer since the rear seat didn’t face backwards to accomodate a gunner protecting a bomber’s tail. Someone with a better sense of airplane history can identify it. Or someone with a Jane’s lying around. In any case, I believe the colors and insignia are British; I’m sure the bright yellow comes from it being a replica.
My friends mentioned there was a loud fire alarm/air siren on the island at around 9:30AM, presumably calling the town’s VFD to the crash site. The pilot was probably OK: the landing gear didn’t look damaged — in fact the pictures show the local police about to tow the thing using the landing gear — and the cockpit cowling was fine. The propeller was chewed up on the ends, but it wouldn’t have taken much for the nose to pitch foward when the landing gear dug into the sand. Certainly, enough to take a foot off the length of the prop.
I didn’t stick around to see if they managed to get the plane off the beach, but I assume they did. It’s not the heaviest machine: three men were able to lift the tail and turn the plane a bit to help hooking it up to an SUV (the rudder appears to be missing because they took it off to better access the tail hook or at least lift it). High tide was very high that evening with the full moon, and it surely would have been up to the level of where the plane was.
Update: New York Newsday has a story on the incident. Sadly, it wasn’t obviously a World War 2 plane, but a more mundane skywriting plane that had mechanical problems. As suspected from the minimal damage to the plane, no one was hurt.