The Concorde Is Taking a Slow Boat to Brooklyn

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out about a short ride by a once-fast machine. We’ll also get details on a shark bite incident off Rockaway Beach.

This morning, the supersonic jet that set a New York-to-London speed record will go on a sub-sub-sub-sub-subsonic ride at 5.7 miles per hour, tops. Quite a contrast to the days when it could cruise at 1,350 m.p.h., more than twice the speed of sound.

The plane is the needle-nose Concorde that has spent the last 15 years on the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, the former aircraft carrier anchored at Pier 86 in the Hudson River. It will be hoisted off the deck, lowered onto a barge and delivered to a shipyard in Brooklyn.

It couldn’t go any other way. It can’t fly. The engines were taken out before it became a museum piece. It cannot be towed. Its 84-foot wingspan is too wide for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel or the Brooklyn Bridge.

But after so much time in the Intrepid’s eclectic collection, it needs a paint job.

And no wonder: “New York is absolutely the worst environment to put an airplane on display,” explained Eric Boehm, the curator of aviation and aircraft restoration at the Intrepid. “We have salt water, we have severe weather, we have high winds that whip up the river even when it’s not a hurricane. The airplane needs T.L.C. constantly.”

So it has to have “a complete repaint not just to make it pretty, but to protect it structurally,” he said.

The Intrepid is not the place to do the stripping, sanding and recoating. “You can’t paint it when it’s sticking out over the Hudson River,” he said. “You have to take it someplace where there’s a giant tent.”

There is one at GMD Shipyard Corporation, at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Boehm said — or there will be one by the time the barge pulls in this afternoon. How long the trip takes depends on tides, but Intrepid officials are figuring on two hours.

Which is only 52 minutes 59 seconds less than the length of the Concorde’s record-setting trip to London, about 3,450 miles away.

It set the record in 1996, 19 years after a less-than-warm welcome in New York. “Everybody on Long Island, they didn’t want this noisy thing,” Boehm said, even though, to hear him tell it, people on Long Island (and in Queens, where Kennedy Airport covers nearly 5,000 acres) would have had to strain their ears to hear the earsplitting noise.

“The sonic booms don’t happen on takeoff,” he said. “You have to get up to altitude, but by then you’re out over the ocean.”

Still, there were protests before the first takeoff and landing in 1977. A school in Howard Beach, Queens, shook so much that the principal and several students painted “Stop the SST” on the roof. But The New York Times said that an initial Concorde flight “met the legal limit by a wide margin” and “did not even set off the Port Authority’s official monitoring device.”

British Airways took its Concordes out of service in 2003, when a round-trip ticket cost $12,000 (about $20,150 now). The Concorde on the Intrepid spent a couple of years in temporary quarters after arriving in New York while Pier 86 was being rebuilt.

Boehm, in recounting of the history of the Concorde, pointed to one year in particular — 1969, the year of the first test flights in a project that was partnership between Britain and France.

“What else happened in 1969?” said Boehm, 64, a retired Air Force master sergeant whose postings included an air base in Britain. “We walked on the moon. Talk to a British person. What was the big event? Flying the Concorde, not landing on the moon. I say this was England’s moon landing, getting the Concorde in the air.”

Weather

It’s a mostly sunny day near the high 80s. At night, it’s partly cloudy, with temperatures around 70.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Tuesday (Feast of the Assumption).

Six years later, Michah Behrend still does not know what bit him — or if it was even a bite.

Behrend needed 40 stitches on his right foot after the incident off Rockaway Beach in 2017. It was apparently the last potential shark bite in New York City — until Monday, when a 65-year-old woman was bitten as she swam near Beach 59th Street.

Lifeguards heard her screaming, according to a police report, and carried her ashore, where they applied a tourniquet. The woman, whose name was not released, was taken to Jamaica Hospital, where she was in serious but stable condition on Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the Parks Department said.

Parks Department officials said there had been no reports of shark bites at Rockaway Beach “in recent memory” before Monday’s incident, the first confirmed attack in the city since 1958, according to the Global Shark Attack File, an unofficial database of encounters between people and sharks. The beach was closed after the woman was taken from the water and remained closed on Tuesday. Jones Beach, farther east on Long Island, banned swimming after three shark sightings on Tuesday, according to George Gorman Jr., the regional director of state-run parks.

Hans Walters, a field scientist with the Wildlife Conservation Society’s New York Aquarium, said that a shark bite like the one on Monday was “extremely unusual” and not “the start of something that we can anticipate more of.” He said that unprovoked attacks by sharks usually involved “people getting caught in the crossfire of a feeding shark that’s eating fish and you just happened to blunder into the situation, unbeknownst to you and unbeknownst to the shark.”

Behrend, who had been surfing that day in September 2017, said on Tuesday that he never found out what caused the wound on his foot. There were reports that a baby shark had been spotted nearby a couple of days earlier.

He said on Tuesday the he had gone surfing at Rockaway as recently as Saturday despite hearing about the latest incident.

“The water temperatures are warmer than usual,” he said. “I think that’s been drawing the sharks in.” But he said that Monday’s attack would not keep him from chasing waves when the beach reopens.

METROPOLITAN diary

Boxers or briefs?

Dear Diary:

On a broiling summer day in July 2008, I was in the underwear section of a deserted men’s department at Macy’s in Herald Square, taking advantage of the store’s air-conditioning as I looked for some new underwear.

A small older woman approached me and asked in a lilting Irish accent if I might help her.

Of course, I said.

“I’m looking for a pair of underpants for an older gentleman,” she said, “but I don’t know what style an older gentleman might wear.”

“Well,” I said, “I might avoid briefs, if I were you.” I ushered her away from the displays of the more revealing items and toward some practical alternatives.

“Perhaps a boxer or an old-fashioned Y-front,” I suggested, “and in not too lurid a color. Or you might even run to a check.”

She seemed to like that idea and picked out a three-pack of checked boxers. Then she hesitated and explained that she only needed one pair. We searched again and found a single pair.

She seemed pleased with her choice, and as we said goodbye, she thanked me gently for my help.

“By the way,” she said, “I forgot to mention that the gentleman in question is deceased.”

— Jeremy Wayne