We'd dial up clearance and ask for the "Governors Island Route" -- this one even more thrilling than the inbound. It's named for the island -- and U.S. Coast Guard base -- in the harbor near the Statue of Liberty. Something of a misnomer, it's the statue, not Governors Island, that became your target as you lifted off from 22R and made an immediate turn over the water.

What came next was breathtaking enough to warrant a preflight briefing, so passengers could enjoy the scenery without being frightened half to death: You'd pass overhead the statue at an assigned height of only 1,100 feet, then start a northbound twist up the Hudson. Things happened fast; it could take fewer than 15 seconds to reach 1,100 feet. Rolling out, the World Trade Center stood ahead, the north tower's antenna reaching 1,742 feet above sea level, about a mile away.

From there it was the opposite of what we'd done for landing, only now we're 400 feet lower. We could follow the river past the GW or do the Central Park, tower cab, Throgs Neck thing backwards. The controllers would offer step-climbs, and once clear of the Class B we'd sometimes go all the way to 18,000 or higher, where the high-altitude hush was sudden and stark.

Maybe that sounds like a lot of work and some risky kicks, but for a competent crew it was no more risky than most standard procedures in a busy area. The city's tallest hazards were the 1,522-foot Empire State Building, and the World Trade Center, both of which, however imposingly they loomed, were a legal distance away. All the federal regs were adhered to, though admittedly it was comforting to remember that rulebook caveat provisioning, "Except when necessary for takeoff and landing ..." There was an illusion of playing it loose when banked 30 degrees over the pointed crown of the Statue of Liberty or humming past a skyscraper.

A passenger came up front once on his way out the door. "I thought I'd seen it all," he told us, and his credentials were lofty. He'd flown the Grand Canyon, hang-glided off a Hawaiian volcano and once rode a helicopter through the Andes. His tour of New York, he told us, was at least as much fun. In the age of the generic, get-me-there-quick airline experience, it was a sensational treat.

Not until recently did I learn corridor flying remains active and legal. Having chalked it up as yet another casualty of Sept. 11, I'm pleasantly surprised -- astonished is more like it -- to find out otherwise. "After the attacks everything was closed off," says Mike Wagner, acting air traffic manager at Newark's control tower. "Today we're pretty much back to normal."

Alas, unrelated revisions to air carrier rules since the 1990s mean that most regional aircraft now adhere to more stringent IFR routings, limiting corridor traffic to all but the smallest commuter and private craft.

Two years ago today, when Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehi steered their hijacked jets into the twin towers, they essentially pulled off corridor runs. Atta, at the controls of American Flight 11, intercepted the Hudson up near the Tappan Zee, just as we did, and followed it downstream until the target was in bull's eye view. Al-Shehi swung United's 175 to the southwest, coming in over the harbor with the statue and Newark to his left.

I think about those takeoffs I used to make from Newark -- the Governor's Island departures -- and how, just after Lady Liberty practically impaled the airplane with her pointed copper flame, those two monoliths would be sitting there in front of you, above you, quickly growing larger in the windshield. Exciting as it was, and with safety just a tug of the wheel away, there was always something unsettling about it, and I'd feel a twinge of relief, the slightest slowing of pulse and heartbeat, at the completion of the turn upriver, away from the buildings.

Atta and al-Shehi never made that turn. They kept going, fully aware that their 767s, along with themselves and untold others, were about to disappear in a molten, pulverizing concussion of infamy. It's something I can barely fathom, yet just the same I was practically there.

I snapped the attached, joltingly prescient photograph from the cockpit of a 19-seater in the early winter of 1994. Today, obviously, the vista from this point in space is a much different one, pilots rolling wings-level to a vacant breadth of firmament. The history of the World Trade Center was a star-crossed one -- the towers, a product of civic and architectural arrogance, were never a beloved landmark for most New Yorkers. But the skyline seems distressingly sad, ordinary and disoriented without them.

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