ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW
Deja Vu
Thomas Fitzpatrick got married in June 1958. He and his bride, Helen, settled in New Jersey while Tommy continued to work as a steamfitter. After visiting his old stomping grounds on October 4, 1958, Tommy Fitz went into a bar for a drink. As the drinks flowed the stories grew. When one bar patron told another that Tommy Fitz had landed an airplane on St. Nicholas Avenue and 181st Street they simply did not believe it. Tommy Fitz got up from his barstool, left the bar, drove to Teterboro Airport, and selected a plane. At 12:20 am, the control tower at Teterboro Airport watched Fitz take off in a Cessna 120 without proper clearance, radio contact, or navigation lights.
Just after 12:35 am, a bus driver at Amsterdam Avenue and 191st Street saw a plane in the rear mirrors coming in for a landing. According to the bus driver, the plane landed next to the bus, bouncing 20 feet up upon contact with the ground and then bounced again and “taxied down to 187th Street.” The bus driver, Harvey Roffe, fled from his bus and ran down to 187th street to see the plane. By the time that he arrived, the pilot was gone. Another witness to the plane’s landing told police that he saw a man who was “tall, blond, and husky wearing a gray suit” fleeing from the plane.
Once again the borrowed plane was in fine working order. It even had 3/4 full tank of fuel! As the police began to draw parallels to the plane landing event from two years earlier, Tommy Fitzpatrick became a person of interest. Upon his first round of questioning, he denied everything. When a witness identified Fitzpatrick as the man who fled the plane and the police told him that his finger prints were all over the plane, he admitted to borrowing the plane and landing it on Amsterdam Avenue.
ADVERTISEMENT - CONTINUE READING BELOW
Thomas Fitzpatrick was again charged with grand larceny and violating the city’s codes of landing a plane on a New York City street. He was also charged with “dangerous and reckless operation of an aircraft.” Fitzpatrick was held on a $10,000 bond. On January 26, 1959, Thomas Fitzpatrick pled guilty for bringing stolen property into the state of New York. The judge proclaimed that Fitzpatrick was most certainly drunk and flew the plane when “dared by a drinking companion.” Then the judge proclaimed that despite Thomas Fitzpatrick’s exemplary civil and military record and the completion of two “miraculous” landings, he was sentenced to six months in jail.
Upon his release from prison, Tommy Fitz returned to working as a union steamfitter. He and his wife, Helen, raised their three sons in Washington Township in Bergen County, New Jersey. Tommy Fitz was an active member of his community belonging to a VFW Post, the Men’s Club at his church, along with other civic organizations. After a battle with cancer, Thomas Fitzpatrick died on September 14, 2009, just past the 53rd anniversary of his first plane landing on a New York City street. A drink consisting of Kahlua, vodka, Chambord, blackberries, egg white, and simple syrup was named in Tommy Fitz’s honor and known as the “Late Night Flight.”
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
Thomas Fitzpatrick (Pilot). Wikipedia.
Double Dare and the Art of Drunken Flying. Check-Six. September 30, 1956.
Late Night Flight. Offering Aviation History & Adventure First-Hand!