Up In The Air – and a $100 Burger

One of the great things about living in Manhattan is making a diverse set of friends, including those that are pilots, own a plane, and like to fly to nearby locations on Sunday morning for breakfast or lunch. These flights are to smaller airports that usually don’t have a control tower, and have a restaurant right within the airport where you can grab a bite and fly right back. Given the time and expense involved to get to these airports, the meals are sometimes otherwise referred to as the $100 burger!

It has been a while since I could go on one of these flights, and today I had the opportunity to fly to Cherry Ridge Airport for breakfast in a Cirrus plane from the Essex County Airport in Caldwell. This one has a parachute that can be deployed to bring the plane down in case of an emergency, which was good to know about!

The flight itself was not long, and I managed to get a time lapse video and some photographs of the ride there and back. The landscape was amazingly green, and we crossed the Delaware River and flew along it for a bit on the way to Cherry Ridge. Pilots on these smaller planes need to announce where they are proactively to be guided by the control tower, and the height at which they fly tends to be in the even thousands of feet plus 500 while flying west, and odd thousands plus 500 ft while flying east, so we were at 4500 ft on our way to Cherry Ridge, and 3500 ft on our way back from there.

The airport was basically a landing strip with a restaurant within it, which appeared to be popular even with the locals as a lot of people were driving up to get a meal. There was plenty of people flying in too based on the number of flights landing with people coming in to eat. We learnt fairly quickly that we got lucky with getting a table without a reservation as lots of people were being turned away without one!

The interesting thing about taking pictures on these flights is that they work only from the side windows, anything in the front always has the propeller – which you cannot see with the naked eye – showing up in the pictures, such as the below.

And here I am getting off the plane after a memorable flight –

So although this is a post about a flight from NJ to PA, it all originated with meeting up with a friend that lives in Manhattan to make this journey, and I did see Manhattan far far away as you can see in the picture below, which qualifies it for this blog!

#gottalovenewyork