Soon after landing, Wilbur announced he would fly again. Wireless signals went out, signal flags went up, and off he went. Instead of heading toward the mouth of the Hudson, as expected, he swung to the west into the wind and, flying over two ferryboats, headed straight for the Statue of Liberty on Bedloe’s Island, circled the statue, and sailed low over the Lusitania, which was then heading down the harbor, outward bound to Liverpool. Thousands of people were watching. Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan was thick with spectators, and passengers on deck on the Lusitania frantically waved hats, scarfs, handkerchiefs as Wilbur passed over their heads.
He maneuvered his plane with perfect control through a whole series of dips and turns. But it was the spectacle of Wilbur Wright and his flying machine circling the Statue of Liberty that made the most powerful impression, which would be talked about, written about, and remembered more than anything, as a writer for the New York Evening Sun tried to express in a front-page account:
Once his great aeroplane, so near the horizon that it seemed one with the ocean gulls among which it flew . . . [was] just above the level of the feet of the Statue of Liberty. An instant later it appeared at the level of the statue’s breast and then passed in front on an even keel.
In the air Wright seemed to pause for a moment to pay the homage of an American aviator to the lady who attests his country’s destinies. Then suddenly turning eastward with the wind, he sped rapidly over the waves while the harbor craft shrieked their welcomes, and the cheering men and women ashore bore witness that our Lady of Liberty had been visited by one of her children in a vessel needing only the winds on which to sail.
Harper’s Weekly, “The Journal of Civilization,” would feature on its next cover a dramatic photograph of Wilbur and the plane circling the Statue of Liberty with the caption, “A New Kind of Gull in New York Harbor.”
“Goes pretty well, Charlie,” Wilbur was reported to have said to Charlie Taylor, when, after a smooth landing, he climbed from the plane back on Governors Island. “Looks alright to me, Will,” replied Charlie.
The next day came news from Potsdam, Germany, that Orville had flown to an altitude of 984 feet, higher than anyone had yet flown in an airplane.
Stiff winds out of the north kept both Wilbur and Glenn Curtiss grounded on Governors Island for two days, Saturday and Sunday, and by then Curtiss announced he had to leave to keep a contract in St. Louis. This left only Wilbur to make the flight up the Hudson River that had been promised and all were waiting for.
The morning of Monday, October 4, though the wind out of the north had eased off to a degree, it was still blowing at 16 miles per hour, or more than Wilbur would have preferred. Sensing it was only going to increase again, he decided to fly. The plane was brought out of the hangar and he looked it over. Finding the gasoline tank not full, he took an old can and filled it himself.
At 9:53, he took off from Governors Island, the emergency canoe still hanging from beneath the plane. The one difference this time was a tiny American flag fixed to the rudder. It had been sent to him by Katharine with the request that he fly it over New York.
Again the wireless messages went off. Again signal flags were flying, and again whistles shrieked, foghorns sounded. Work came to a standstill in much of the city and there was a “stampede” to the windows and rooftops of office buildings to see the spectacle in the sky of “wonderful Wilbur Wright, the Dayton aviator,” as one New York paper was calling him.
From the new skyscrapers like the Metropolitan Life Tower the view of the harbor and the Hudson River was panoramic. Most spectacular of all was the outlook from the upper floors of the forty-seven-story Singer Building on Broadway, which, once completed, would be the tallest skyscraper on earth.
When Wilbur headed across the harbor and turned northward into the wind heading for the Hudson River the excitement grew even greater. He had climbed by then to about 150 feet and was moving at a speed of about 36 miles per hour. But on reaching the river, as he later recounted, he began getting air currents such as he had never had to cope with. They were coming off the skyscrapers and so strong and dangerous he had to drop elevation “considerably” and hug the west, or New Jersey, side of the river.
“I went to a height just a little above the ferryboats until I reached the battleships, and then I skimmed over their funnels. I passed so close to the funnels that I could smell the smoke from them.”
Asked later if one of the British battleships fired a salute in his honor, Wilbur said he did not know what it was, but something made an “awful noise.”
Seeing the dome of Grant’s Tomb on the right side of the river at West 122nd Street, he decided he had gone far enough, and after making a large 180 degree turn, he started south, back down the river, this time moving considerably faster with the wind behind him. “I think I came back in half the time. . . . I hugged the water much closer and kept further toward the Jersey shore as I passed the downtown skyscrapers.”