When I was a kid planes flew directly over my house all day long.  They were bound for Kennedy Airport which was only eleven miles away. The aircraft were spectacular, especially the big 747s and DC-10s lumbering over Carle Place at about 2000 feet. There is not a single time that an airplane passed over that I didn’t stop and look at it. And I do the same thing when I see one today.

Naturally, I wondered what would happen if one of them fell on my house. Sometimes they looked a little too low or sounded a bit weird —and they often seemed to be moving so slowly that they could never stay in the air. Carle Place once had several busy airfields as neighbors, so plane crashes were part of the local history. In 1929 two planes crashed on the same day within a couple of miles of each other. But planes were always crashing on Long Island —I even knew someone whose house had been hit by a plane decades before.

It’s best not to dwell on airplanes dropping out of the sky. At least not  if you ever want to get on one again.