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- Nov 21, 2015
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A friend of mine spent the last 6 years building a spot-on replica of the Ghostbusters ECTO-1 out of a real 1959 Cadillac Miller-Meteor duplex. He and I have had several adventures in the past, visiting the interior Firehouse filming location in Los Angeles in 2010, and in 2011 we even got to spend a day locked in a warehouse with the original screen-used car.
A few years back, the idea popped into our head to not only take his finished car to New York, but to do it on Halloween as part of the ultimate "nerd bucket list" trip. We'd hit all the usual filming locations, take time to get some photos at iconic NYC landmarks, and treat it as a fun "mecca" journey, sorta.
When planning the trip it occurred to me that I could take the copter and recreate the Manhattan Bridge shot, and I started doing research. Typing in "Manhattan Bridge Drone" does not yield a collection of videos from photographers, instead it produces a half dozen articles about people being arrested. However, only half of the operators were charged with anything, NYPD has no laws they can enforce other than endangerment, and most of the incidents involved operators flying from the Manhattan side of the river or getting too close to helicopters.
I figured I would play it by ear, knowing the odds of me being able to get the shot were abysmal. We scoped out DUMBO on Thursday before the Cadillac arrived, and I was horrified to discover the sheer amount of helicopter traffic in the immediate vicinity of the bridge. I was aware of the heliport on the other side of the river in Lower Manhattan, and I've been in NYC three times before so I thought I had a good idea of what I'd encounter, but I never expected one helicopter every 90 seconds, flying at or slightly above tower-height over the bridge, plus the amount of traffic in the river itself.
Defeat was accepted, it was novel idea but the risk to others and, more likely, the risk of being spotted and alarming someone was just too great.
We returned to the area on Halloween to get some shots near the water, and I was astonished to find no air traffic, no boats, and the parks completely empty. We waited for the sun to set lower to get the right light, the sky and river were completely quiet, so I broke out the Phantom. While the Cadillac made it's way to the bridge ramp, I did one flight alongside the bridge making sure I could keep the camera pointed at a random car. I flew back to the east side, caught the Cadillac, followed it across the bridge and reversed direction to avoid flying over FDR Drive.
The flight app says it was a 2.5-minute flight with a max altitude of 243 feet.
