Pan Am tried a rooftop airport hub in New York, and the result was a fatal mistake: Jalopnik

The New York City landmark formerly known as the Pan Am Building – now the MetLife Building – has a long and storied history. It was the 1960s, with an abundance of jet-age optimism. Pan Am CEO Juan Trippe wanted to make a pretty big deal with his massive new headquarters in New York. Although it resembles a tombstone, architects would say the design is a mix of Bauhaus and Brutalist.

The idea was simple: bypass the gridlock of the street by turning a skyscraper into a 59-story jetway. For a brief, shining moment in the 1960s and a tragically brief revival in 1977, New York Airways (NYA) partnered with Pan Am and operated a scheduled helicopter company from the roof of the Pan Am Building. It was in reality a form of corporate dominance – who else could say they ferry passengers from the roof of their headquarters to their planes? Carrying passengers directly from Manhattan to JFK International was an idea that was actually ahead of its time, but for unfortunate reasons.

Sadly and tragically, the dream of a Jetsons-like city came to a screeching halt on May 16, 1977. A mechanical failure on top of the roof of 200 Park Ave. killed passengers, rained debris onto the streets below and even claimed the life of a bystander waiting for the bus.

Before it became the site of a tragedy, the Pan Am Building was essentially a monument to the ego. Opened in 1963, it was the largest commercial office building in the world by square meters. It’s an octagonal slab that critics immediately hated because it blocked the view of Park Avenue, but Pan Am President Trippe didn’t care about your opinion. Called “a city within a city,” the building features what was then the largest HVAC system ever installed in a skyscraper and 65 high-speed elevators to move a large number of employees and visitors alike.

To sell such a high-flying lifestyle, they didn’t just throw a windsock on the roof and call it a day. The 57th and 58th floors were the Copter Club – a lounge that was more airport terminal than waiting room. You could check your bags in Midtown, sip a martini while looking down at the ants crawling along 42nd, and theoretically not touch your luggage again until you’ve landed at your destination — maybe London in this case.

It worked for a while. During a 1966 transit strike, the roof carried 700 passengers a day desperately trying to escape the halted public transportation system. But even then, the writing was on the wall – or rather, the writing was on the ears. The original Vertol helicopters were so loud that tenants and neighbors complained incessantly, leading to the first closure of the service in 1968.

When the service was relaunched in 1977, those in power insisted that things would be different. One change was the hardware: they switched to the Sikorsky S-61L, a version of the Army’s Sea King. To make the economics work, New York Airways used a procedure known as “hot loading.” If you know anything about aviation safety, that sentence will probably make you cringe.

At high loads, the pilots run the engines at full power and spin the enormous 20-meter-high rotor blades as passengers board and disembark between flights. The idea was to minimize turnaround time and maximize the number of flights they could do in a day. In the airline industry, a bird on the ground loses money, and at the end of the day this was still a business.

On the afternoon of May 16, 1977, Flight 972 landed on the roof, engines running as the twenty or so passengers disembarked, while a new group of passengers waited to board. The helicopter’s blades were still spinning at high speed. The design left little room for error. Unfortunately, the machine was about to fail.

The crash was not caused by pilot error. It wasn’t Mother Nature – it was Father Physics. The Sikorsky S-61L was on tricycle landing gear and the main gear had a fault. This is evident from a report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the upper right front fitting was made of 7075-T73 aluminum, a metal chosen for its resistance to stress corrosion cracking. It wasn’t immune to old-fashioned fatigue, though. A small pit on the surface, probably caused by simple corrosion as water entered the hollow support, had allowed a crack to spread over hundreds of landings.

At 5:35 p.m. the strut broke. The helicopter lost support on the landing deck on the right and rolled over. Because the rotors were still spinning at speed – thanks to that hot loading protocol – the blades hit the deck. Four passengers waiting on the roof were killed by fragmentation, and several others were injured – perhaps this is a good time to note that this is taking place on a skyscraper, so of course there was a snowball effect.

A large portion of the rotor blade was launched over the side of the building. The section collapsed on the 39th floor before crashing onto the street below, killing a woman who was simply waiting for the bus.

The aftermath was immediate and permanent. The helipad atop the Pan Am Building was permanently closed that same day and never reopened to commercial traffic. The disaster exposed a huge gap in the safety philosophy of the time – specifically the limits of the safe life (think of this as the expected lifespan) of aircraft components versus the ability to tolerate damage (the ability to withstand defects). New York Airways struggled to limp along, but after another accident at Newark International Airport in 1979, it filed for bankruptcy.

The crash effectively ended the era of rooftop commuting in New York City. Regulators and city officials have imposed a de facto ban on large rooftop heliports, pushing commercial helicopter operations to the waterfront — where a failure, like the crash earlier this year that killed a Spanish businessman and his family, is more likely to end up in the river, not the people on the streets below.

Today, the roof of the MetLife building sits empty. It’s a stark reminder of the Icarus paradox: the human ambition to fly and the mechanical reality that gravity always wins in the end. So the next time you’re stuck in traffic on Van Wyck, remember that it’s better than dodging rotor blades on Madison Avenue. Pan Am eventually filed for bankruptcy in 1991, but recent news points to the brand’s return – hopefully with better decision-making at the helm during this relaunch.