Boats, planes, and buses

On our water taxi the day before we’d seen the aircraft carrier Intrepid on the waterfront and so today we started off the day by heading down there to check it out. The Intrepid is an old aircraft carrier that has been decommissioned and is now used as a floating museum for the ship and various military aircraft. The ship is huge as you would expect, but has been decommissioned for some time so a lot of the technology aboard is quite dated. This makes it even more impressive that they were able to operate so many aircraft off the ship so effectively with such primitive tools.

I was most looking forward to seeing some of the accompanying items, such as the Blackbird spy plane, the nuclear submarine Growler and a retired British Airways Concorde. The Blackbird is an amazing machine, designed to fly much higher than other aircraft for reconnaissance only. This in itself is pretty neat but the best bit is the way it is powered. To put it simply it operates as a normal jet at lower speeds but once it gets up towards Mach 2 the jet is no longer required as the engines effectively compress and burn air alone, with no additional fuel required. This isn’t to say that the plane is environmentally friendly, but just that this was a huge advance in jet propulsion.

The Concorde is an aircraft in a similar vein, a huge, expensive and eventually redundant step forward in passenger travel. The ability to move people around in the skies faster than the speed of sound were a huge feat of engineering, but was so costly to create and run that, even without the horrible Paris crash, it was likely that it would eventually fail in the face of high capacity jumbos. That said, I think that the Concorde is a very attractive plane and it was great to see it in the flesh. Unfortunately we weren’t able to go inside but you can’t have everything!

The other interesting exhibit was the nuclear sub Growler, docked beside the Intrepid. The sub wasn’t nuclear powered, but was armed with nuclear ballistic missiles which it would launch just off the coast of Russia during the cold war. While I generally disagree with most US military policy, it was still interesting to be able to go down into a submarine (awesome) and see how they fit 100 people into it to run it (holy hell it’s small).

Once we’d had our fill of US military history we headed back into the city and jumped on the uptown tour with Grey Line. This took us right around Central Park and up into Harlem, before coming back down Museum Mile. With only four full days to see New York the ability to just jump on a bus and see the different parts of the city is very useful, given that we don’t have the opportunity to spend much time on the ground.

We rounded out the day of sightseeing with a trip to Ripley's Believe It Or Not on Times Square. This is a whole building of weird and unusual items from around the world, which while not as authoritative as a  museum was really good for a laugh.

And because we can, we had Mexican food for dinner. Around the corner from our hotel. America is awesome.