The current civic mood is one of disgruntlement—flight attendants being harassed, shoving matches in testing lines, anti-vax protests. (“It’s a violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Section 2, if you don’t let us sit down in the Olive Garden in Times Square!” one sit-in participant was heard screaming recently.) It’s easy to blame the peevishness on the pandemic. But maybe everyone’s just irritated by all the helicopters? In the year before COVID, 311 received three thousand helicopter-noise complaints; last year, it received twenty-six thousand. Blades fly sorties to J.F.K. and East Hampton. Tourist convoys patrol Central Park. One chopper picked up passengers in a vacant lot in Crown Heights, then buzzed the Verrazzano; an N.Y.P.D. helicopter pursued it into New Jersey. “Is it legal to do what’s been done?” the pilot asked, in the Daily News. “That we will figure out eventually.”
Caroline Wood lives in Chelsea, within rotor-wash range of Hudson River commuters and Empire State Building sightseers. By the summer of 2020, she recounted, “I thought we were under attack.” At first, Wood, a screenwriter, aired her grievances on Twitter. Some replies were hostile. She shrugged them off. “The next thing that happened is we started getting these phone hangups,” Wood said. “Our caller I.D. would identify them as ‘New York Helicopter.’ I’m usually not a paranoid person. But that was definitely odd.”
“I kept telling her she was going to get kneecapped,” her partner, the playwright Bruce Norris, said.
Wood said, “Not to be dramatic, but, when they’re circling directly above our building every day, that is a particular sensory experience. I think almost anyone would associate that with warfare.”
It was time for a counter-offensive. At 1600 hours on a recent Sunday, Wood and Norris joined a ragtag corps of air observers to scan the skies along the Hudson. A command post, consisting of bicycles and an anti-helicopter sandwich board, was established in hostile territory, just outside the Thirtieth Street heliport. The troops, about fifteen in all, were affiliated with Stop the Chop NY/NJ, a group seeking a federal de-helicopterized zone (with exceptions for police, media, and medevacs). The mission: scout the enemy, gripe, commiserate.
“We’re all volunteers,” Melissa Elstein, Stop the Chop’s chair, said. “You have people like me spending, I would say, all of my free time on this. People are suffering. Their homes have become uninhabitable. So they’re sitting inside with the radar to track the misery.”
“We’re not normally crazy,” Adrian Benepe, a board member, added. “This has turned us crazy.” Benepe’s radicalization had occurred during his day job: he’s the president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which sits directly beneath the J.F.K. and Hamptons flight paths. He blamed the inundation on foreign invaders—in 2016, New York restricted the number of flights from city heliports. “So the industry said, ‘Thank you very much, we’ll go to New Jersey,’ ” Benepe said. “Governors Island is like our early-detection outpost now.”
On the waterfront, preparations were under way. Official hats were distributed, binoculars produced. Radar was consulted. Someone held a decibel reader. Bogeys appeared from across the river, where FlyNyon, a major tourist outfit, operates. The first helicopter thundered toward the landing pad. Everyone braced against the wind. “Ninety-nine decibels!” someone bellowed.
When the next helicopter swooped in, the group released a volley of boos and thumbs-down. One man yelled, “Have you heard about how sonar hurts the whales? Well, we’re mammals, too!”
As they scanned the sky, intel was exchanged. “I can tell an N.Y.P.D. from a FlyNyon,” Wood said. “The N.Y.P.D. is sort of flatulent,” Norris said. A man named Ken Coughlin added, “I can tell a Sikorsky from a Bell.” Someone else warned, “If you hear an R44, duck for cover.”
Disaster scenarios were reviewed. “I’m thinking about a fully loaded Sikorsky flying down Flatbush Avenue into a school,” Benepe said. A woman fretted, “Somebody could drop poison into the reservoir. I’ve seen them hovering low.”
The assembled appreciated a certain esprit de corps. “I feel like no one believes us,” Wood said. “But it’s just this idea that thousands of New Yorkers can be disrupted so that five tourists can take a shoe selfie over the Empire State Building.”
Another flight zoomed by. A man in a red jacket named David Koch (“like the dead billionaire”) threw up his hands: “You think, There is no god!” Morale was slipping. A big moon was rising. A rainbow appeared over Central Park: a shoe-selfie dream.
Just then, a Sikorsky strafed in low, directly overhead. “One hundred and five decibels!” came the call. The wind tossed bicycles to the ground. River water soaked the group. A woman screamed in terror. Benepe, his hat sent flying, turned into the squall, holding aloft a middle finger. Afterward, the corps decided to retreat. “I think that was their big ‘fuck you,’ ” Benepe said. ♦
