As best I can sort out from wiki, the long runway at Floyd Bennet was built 4000 feet long in the late 1920s. But the rest of the area it was built is now level sandy soil and almost certainly was then too. The whole thing is fill. (As is JFK today).
So the good news is it’s a fairly benign runway to run off the end of. The bad news is it’s short enough you might be doing 100+ knots when you do. That gets real ugly. Just like car crashes, the kinetic energy to dissipate scales at the square of the speed. e.g. 100 knots is 4x worse than 50 knots.
Faced with that problem myself, I’d be looking to ditch in the surf just offshore a flat straight beach. Which is available on the south shore of Long Island, and also in NJ south of the entrance to the NY harbor.
Actually, the Atlantic was a only few hundred miles wide during the Jurassic Age, and Manhattan Island did not exist. But it was a great episode anyway.
I hold by my earlier thoughts on another timejump. They’d be as likely to end up millions of years in the future or again millions in the past. Neither of those times/places will have nice runways either.
I’ve been a fan of the original Twilight Zone series but for some reason I don’t remember this episode. I’m going to have to find it and watch it if I don’t already have it somewhere in my archives.
There’s a supposedly real-life version of a time-traveling airliner. The myth alleges that on July 2, 1955, a Douglas DC-4 passenger plane took off from New York City bound for Miami with 57 passengers and 5 crew members, only to vanish from radar without a trace. According to the legend, the exact same plane suddenly reappeared and landed in Caracas, Venezuela, 37 years later in 1992 with the passengers completely unaware that any time had passed.
Would be a fascinating world we inhabit if things like this actually happened, but sadly and boringly it was a complete fabrication by a notorious tabloid called the Weekly World News.
Wherever they land, it needs to have existed in 1939.
Unless we’re assuming another time jump not in the episode. In which case we can pick wherever & whenever for them to reappear. Probably safest for them to reappear at the the time they originally left.
If they showed up in 2005 or 2025 in the middle of NYC airspace with LGA, EWR, and JFK there, they’d trigger an apeshit response from ATC then DOD. They’d not know what radio frequencies to use, the universal emergency frequency hadn’t been invented in their time so they wouldn’t know what it was, and their radios couldn’t tune about 75% of ATC’s frequencies.
Yeah. I mean, Dinos one jump, 1939 the next? No telling the 3rd jump, but back home is not a good bet.
Mitchell field is right there, and it was made for B18s and such. They just finished (1938) the concrete Runway 05/23 , either 5000 feet or 6700 feet, i can not tell. BUT- Actual Landing Distance (Ground Roll)= around 2,600 feet on a dry surface once the wheels touch down and reverse thrust/brakes are applied.
So, yeah they could land.
In 1960 a 707 tried to land at a too short short runway at RAF Northolt - everyone got off more or less okay, no fatalities.
Exactly. 1939 may create challenges for landing, but rolling the dice doesn’t seem like it’d likely increase your chances.
If every moment in the past has an equal chance of being the next scenario (which you’d have to assume without any other evidence), the probability of ending up in a time where you’re royally screwed is really high.
One thing I’ve always wondered about: How was the plane still able to fly after 1939? Did it miraculously have an infinite supply of aviation fuel so it could keep on trying to break the time barrier?
1939 is a tricky year for accidental time travelers from the future. Is it before Sept. 1, 1939, and if so, do you try to warn the world that Hitler is about to invade Poland?
If you’re too late to stop that, or just decide to pass on warning the world about the invasion of Poland (after all, you just got to 1939-- is it your responsibility to immediately try to save the world?), then you have two years to decide on another big dilemma-- do you try to warn the U.S. about the Pearl Harbor attack beforehand?
If you do try to give a warning, it probably won’t go well for you. You’ll probably be treated as a crackpot, and ignored. Then, when the Pearl Harbor attack does happen, they’ll assume you’re an Axis spy or sympathizer and imprisoned, or worse. “But but but, I’m a time traveler” you say. “Remember the newfangled jet plane that landed in NY 1939?” you say. “oh, you mean the Nazi jet? We know the Nazis have been working on advanced airplane technology for a long time. Everybody on that jet was clearly a Nazi sleeper spy”.
Even if you’re successful in your warning and convince them to prepare for the Pearl Harbor attack, is that the right call? The U.S. was highly isolationist before that, and it took the atrocity of the attack as a wake-up call to bring the U.S. into WWII. If the Japanese are successfully stopped and the attack is reduced to lesser news (or even kept from the public) and inadequate outrage, does it prevent or delay the U.S. entry into the war, and if so, does that lead to (gasp) the Axis powers winning the war?
Trying to warn the world is always a mugs game. Use your knowledge to invest smart & retire early.
And keep an eye out for signs the timeline you’re now living is deviating from the one you learned in history books. Not that you can correct that, but as soon as you see a significant deviation (e.g. Hitler doesn’t invade Russia), substantially everything you think you know about the future is now invalidated. And now you’re done being a time traveler and are just a normie citizen who needs to wait to tomorrow to find out what happens tomorrow.
Someone wrote exactly that story, Jimmy Doolittle suspected an attack on Pearl and convinced his superior to give him a few squadrons of bombers, that he then trained in low level glide bomb attacks. Kido Butai was right when and where he suspected they would be, and he did enough damage that Nagumo called the attack off. Author insisted that yes the morale and anger effects were thus much muted, but I don’t think that would have made a long-term difference.
And newspapers, magazines, books, ID, etc. from 1961 would have been sufficiently similar to their 1939 counterparts that they would have been seen as fakes.
Now, if the plane had come from 1991, or better yet the 2000s, they could produce some electronics like an early cell phone or Blackberry device that would have been more convincing.
