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Went up in a totally manual ancient small plane from NJ (Garmin GPS with rubber band onto the dash) and flew right into the City Hall Philly area.....really close to Major Airports.
I think they allowed some of those small planes a slot from 1000-1500 feet high or similar. This may have changed slightly (those who want to learn to read charts can go to skyvector).
But, yeah, I've flown airliners over Manhattan many a time and usually lower than 30K feet as short hops (Philly to Hartford, etc.) often don't go up really high.
There is a lot of space when you look at things in 3D......air lanes are separated by as little as 500 feet (usually 1,000 or more feet)....
We have a good friend who used to be wealthy (her hubby was a con man on Wall Street...really!). They lived near Philly and had a heli and pilot at the ready.
A typical evening was "honey, do you feel like going to NYC for dinner and shopping?"..
Many evenings they spent 50K all told with dinner, shopping and the heli.
You can all feel better because both are dead broke now.
Aircraft are allowed to fly over Manhattan because, basically, they are no danger to the people below them. Should an airliner lose power when directly over NYC, say at around an altitude of 30,000 feet, that plane would continue to descend for many, many miles before touching ground.
Planes do not fly due to their having engines. They fly due to their having wings (which generates lift when the craft has air moving over their wings). The engines are to get them altitude and forward speed. Sounds a little counter intuitive but ask yourself, how do gliders/sailplanes fly?
Most crashes that happen in urban areas do so on approach or climb-out because airports serving urban areas tend to be located in those urban areas, for obvious reasons. And even when a new airport is built beyond a metropolitan area, growth around that airport invariably follows. There's basically no way to avoid having airliners fly over metropolitan areas.
That said, casualties on the ground are a very small fraction of the total number of fatalities in airline incidents. And, no, 9/11 isn't a good counter-example, because that involved airliners intentionally targeting urban areas from hundreds of miles away - prohibiting flight over urban areas wouldn't have done a thing to prevent them.
Airliners occasionally crash. Every once in awhile, a crash kills people on the ground. Allowing airliners to fly over urban areas is no more unreasonable than allowing automobiles to drive through urban areas - they do, and the ratio pedestrians to vehicle occupants is much higher than the ratio of airline passengers to persons on the ground killed (it's more than 1-in-7 - in 2017, about 40,000 motor vehicle deaths to about 6,000 pedestrian deaths).
Most crashes that happen in urban areas do so on approach or climb-out because airports serving urban areas tend to be located in those urban areas, for obvious reasons. And even when a new airport is built beyond a metropolitan area, growth around that airport invariably follows. There's basically no way to avoid having airliners fly over metropolitan areas.
That said, casualties on the ground are a very small fraction of the total number of fatalities in airline incidents. And, no, 9/11 isn't a good counter-example, because that involved airliners intentionally targeting urban areas from hundreds of miles away - prohibiting flight over urban areas wouldn't have done a thing to prevent them.
Airliners occasionally crash. Every once in awhile, a crash kills people on the ground. Allowing airliners to fly over urban areas is no more unreasonable than allowing automobiles to drive through urban areas - they do, and the ratio pedestrians to vehicle occupants is much higher than the ratio of airline passengers to persons on the ground killed (it's more than 1-in-7 - in 2017, about 40,000 motor vehicle deaths to about 6,000 pedestrian deaths).
Since takeoff and landing are considered the most dangerous parts of the flight/s, it is not surprising that sometimes urban areas are effected when a plane crashes.
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