If a person who is about to board a plane in Omaha is asked where they are going to fly and answers “Omaha,” they may receive some puzzled looks and even an audible, “But aren’t you there now?” However, when you live in metropolises that support multiple airports, such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Tokyo, it is possible to fly from one to the other.
While the distances between them may not be all that great, surface travel, particularly during peak hours, can take an inordinate amount of time, and there’s nothing like landing at an airport and heading to the next gate for a connecting flight. and even have your luggage checked in line spacing. that.
New York qualifies for having one of these networks between airports and its namesake New York Airways made a valiant two-decade attempt to offer scheduled rotary wing service within it.
As the third to do so, he followed Los Angles Airways and Helicopter Air Services of Chicago and received an operational certificate from the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in December 1951 to fly between the Idlewild Airport, La Guardia and Catchment Area of Newark.
Reflecting the early development of aviation, in which open-cabin biplanes carried mail on designated routes and accommodated some passengers to increase revenue when space permitted, it moved to passenger payload form on 8 July 1952 with the seven-seat Sikorsky S-55s. , eventually expanding beyond its network between airports to New Brunswick, Princeton and Trenton in New Jersey. Penetration service in Manhattan to the Hudson River that hugs the West 30th Street heliport began four years later, on December 5.
Noise and vibration were counteracted with comfort, speed, travel times measured in minutes, and unparalleled views of the Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline. Approaches to touchdown point “H” surrounded on the pier protruding from the water put the size of the aircraft in perspective as the Manhattan monoliths practically swallowed vit during ignition.
Earlier that year, on April 21, New York Airways launched the most advanced and highest-capacity tandem twin-rotor Vertol 44B into service.
“It was the first transport helicopter to have its cabin arranged like that of a conventional airplane, with capacity for 15 passengers, mainly two on the starboard side of the cabin with the aisle and luggage space on the left,” according to REG Davies in “United States Airlines Since 1914” (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998, p. 475).
However, passenger acceptance and expansion quickly required even larger and more advanced equipment, prompting New York Airways’ initial order of $ 4,350,000 for ten Vertol V-107-IIs on January 15, 1960. It was then scaled back. half to five.
The type that eventually became its virtual flagship and symbol, has its origins not only in a design, but in the very manufacturer that created it. Vertol, a Philadelphia-based rotary-wing company, was simultaneously designing two tandem rotor helicopters, namely the Chinook for the US Army and the CH-46A Sea Knight for the Navy and Marines of USA
The latter, the result of a design competition for a Marine Corps medium assault transport, first flew in August 1962 and was first delivered two years later, transporting troops and cargo between ships located in the Sea from South China and Vietnam. Of its three prototypes, one was modified to the civil standard V-107-II and first flew on October 25, 1960, at a time when Boeing had acquired the company, resulting in the Boeing-Vertol name.
Powered by a 1,250-horsepower General Electric T58-8 turboshaft engine, it featured a 50-foot rotor diameter. With an overall length of 84 feet, it had a gross weight of 18,400 pounds.
Flying for the first time in full production form the following year, on May 19, it was certified by the FAA in January 1962 and entered New York Airway’s scheduled service on July 1. The remaining ten built were sold to Kawasaki of Japan to serve as a license. produced master planes, but that plan never went into production.
The images of the V-107-II taking off from the Pan Am rooftop helipad symbolized the island of Manhattan stretched across the skyscrapers and were an integral part of the city’s culture. They also represented one aspect of urban mobility: the subway below their streets and helicopters over their buildings represented successful technological triumphs over traffic-saturated streets and significantly reduced travel times.
“Twenty-five passengers were traveling in this twin-turbine design at a cruising speed of 140 mph,” according to Len Morgan in “Airliners of the World” (Arco Publishing Company, 1966, p. 90). “New York Airways took it from Kennedy International to the foot of Wall Street in 16 minutes or to the top of the Pan Am Building in seven. Either trip required a hectic hour and a quarter drive during rush hour.”
New York Airways was able to operate at half-hour intervals, and its annual passenger totals reflected the popularity of its offerings: 8,758 in its first year of operation and more than 250,000 in its 10th.
While rotary wing operations offered numerous advantages, including multiple daily frequencies; low-capacity, easy-to-fill cabins; fast air jumps; incomparable views; and the ability to land on any postage stamp-sized patch, whether paved or not, also had its downsides. They had high operating costs, produced significant noise, featured mechanical and engine complexity, operated in densely populated urban areas where safety was a primary concern, required subsidies for profitability, and, at least initially, were dependent on weather and visual weather conditions.
The phasing out of subsidies required service interruptions, including those at the West 30th Street heliport and Bridgeport, Connecticut. On April 11, 1965, they were eliminated entirely, affecting not just New York Airways, but other comparable rotary-wing concerns in Chicago and Los Angeles.
Pan American World Airways issued a financial lifesaver, which purchased two additional V-107-IIs for $ 850,000 each and then leased them to New York Airways to operate at the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadows.
Sikorsky, through its parent Untied Aircraft Corporation, did the same with three S-61s. Powered by the same General Electric T58-8 engine, but with a different configuration, a shorter fuselage and a 62-foot larger rotor diameter, it was the competitor to the V-107-II, but was otherwise similar with a 25- passenger capacity and a gross weight of 18,700 pounds. It was inaugurated in service on December 21, 1965.
Avoiding all surface traffic and reducing travel time to just seven minutes, the Boeing-Vertol V-107-II and Sikorsky S-61 service between the Pan Am rooftop helipad and the JFK allowed passengers to check in for your fixed-wing flights at the airport. Pan Am Building 45 minutes before scheduled departure. Seventeen round trips a day offered maximum comfort. Fares were $ 7.00 one way and $ 10.00 round trip.
Because the service complied with the CAB’s “convenience and public necessity” clause, both Pan Am and TWA were able to make equity investments in New York Airways, the former with a sum of 24.4 percent and the latter with 15.6 percent.
Sikorsky S-61s sported the TWA emblem on the aft sides of the fuselage.
Aside from the airline’s financial fatalities, there were also human fatalities, creating dark clouds of doubt about rotary wing technology for scheduled commercial operations.
On May 18, 1977, for example, a New York Airways S-61L collapsed during boarding on top of the Pan Am helipad, taking the lives of five while doing so, including one person walking by. Madison Avenue below where the unleashed rotor blade hit it.
Two years later, in April 1979, three were killed when a rotor blade detached from another S-61 at Newark International Airport.
Fatigue and metal failure had caused the right landing gear to collapse in the first incident and the tail rotor to break in the second.
Forced to cease operations, New York Airways filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; And although various strategies were devised to resuscitate him, none proved fruitful.
The 18-year, four-type rotary wing operations scheduled for mail and passengers between airports and neighboring New York Airways states were convenient and popular and defined a new market and purpose for the design. But the ones that existed then were loud, complex, fuel-thirsty, and ultimately flawed, and not necessarily far enough forward for safe, profitable, high-frequency daily operations, leaving later carriers like New York Helicopter. to fill the void. in the New York airport area and many others around the world. While the technology had intermittently improved and was a measure of the guy’s success, its operating costs and profitability made up the others.
“Therefore, after twelve years of passenger operations, helicopter carriers (including New York Airways, Chicago Helicopter Airways, Los Angeles Airways, and San Francisco and Oakland Airlines) had had a good opportunity to demonstrate the efficiency of aircraft. powered by rotors. but they had not been able to defend their case “, concludes Davies (op. cit. p. 479).
Article sources:
Davies, REG “United States Airlines since 1914”. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998.
Morgan, Len. “Passenger Aircraft of the World”. New York: Arco Publishing Company, Inc., 1966.
