By Jared Ebersole in Video — 14 Apr 2026

The Rooftop Helicopter Crash That Ended a New York Fantasy

For a brief moment, the Pan Am Building promised six-minute helicopter trips from Midtown to JFK. A 1977 landing-gear failure ended the dream.

The Pan Am Building was built for the kind of future New York wanted to believe in.

You would finish work in Midtown, walk into a skyscraper above Grand Central, rise by elevator to the roof, and board a helicopter to the airport. No taxi gridlock. No tunnel traffic. No inching across Queens. Just rotor blades, skyline, and a flight to JFK that took about as long as waiting for an elevator in the wrong office tower.

It was glamorous, loud, efficient, and obviously dangerous.

Where it happened

MetLife Building, formerly the Pan Am Building, 200 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10166.

The building, completed in the early 1960s, was already controversial. It loomed directly behind Grand Central Terminal, interrupting Park Avenue's view corridor and drawing criticism from people who thought it was too massive, too blunt, and too disrespectful to the terminal below.

But its roof had something most Manhattan skyscrapers did not: a large, flat, open platform.

That made it tempting as a vertical airport.

New York Airways began helicopter service from the Pan Am Building roof in December 1965. Passengers could check in at the base, ride up through the building, and fly to Pan Am's terminal at JFK. Contemporary accounts describe the JFK trip as averaging a little over six minutes. For business travelers in the jet age, the proposition was irresistible: make the airport feel like an extension of Midtown.

The service did not last the first time.

Noise complaints, safety concerns, cost issues, and ridership problems helped shut it down in 1968. But the fantasy did not die. In early 1977, helicopter service returned, this time using Sikorsky S-61 aircraft. New York still wanted to believe that the city could solve ground congestion by moving straight up.

On May 16, 1977, that belief broke apart on the roof.

At about 5:35 p.m., a New York Airways Sikorsky S-61L had landed on the Pan Am Building heliport. Its 20 passengers had disembarked. Another group was waiting to board while the helicopter remained on the pad with its rotors turning. The operation was meant to be fast. In airline language, this kind of quick turnaround kept the aircraft moving and reduced time lost between flights.

Then the right landing gear failed.

The helicopter rolled onto its side. The spinning main rotor blades struck the rooftop and shattered. Four people waiting to board were killed on the roof, and another person was seriously injured. A blade fragment went over the edge of the building and fell to the street, killing a pedestrian at Madison Avenue and 43rd Street and seriously injuring another.

Five people died because a rooftop airport put heavy machinery, passengers, and the public realm into the same vertical accident path.

The National Transportation Safety Board traced the probable cause to fatigue failure in a fitting in the right main landing gear tube assembly. In plainer terms, a crack had grown in a critical landing-gear component until it could no longer carry the load. The helicopter did not have to crash from the sky for the accident to be catastrophic. It only had to tip while the rotors were still turning.

That is what made the Pan Am crash so decisive.

Urban aviation had always carried a promise: use the roof because the street is too crowded. But the roof is not isolated from the city. It is above sidewalks, buses, taxis, office workers, windows, and the people who never bought a helicopter ticket. When a rotor blade leaves the aircraft 800 feet up, the accident becomes part of the street.

The heliport closed that day and never reopened.

New York still has helicopter service, but the dream of routine commercial airport flights from skyscraper rooftops effectively ended with the Pan Am Building. The city's heliports moved back toward waterfront and ground-level facilities, where risk, noise, access, and emergency response could be managed differently.

The old idea remains seductive because it solved a real problem.

Getting to the airport from Manhattan can still be miserable. The fastest route depends on traffic, tunnels, transit connections, weather, and luck. A rooftop helicopter promised to slice through all of that with pure geometry: up, across, down.

But cities are not diagrams.

They are dense, layered, and unforgiving. A small mechanical failure in the wrong place can turn a convenience into a disaster. The Pan Am Building's helipad was not just a transportation experiment. It was a test of whether New York's rooftops could become public infrastructure.

For a short time, the answer looked like yes.

After May 16, 1977, the answer was no.