For a brief moment in the 1960s, and again, very briefly in 1977, a traveler in Midtown Manhattan could step into an office tower, take an elevator to the roof, and board a helicopter headed for the airport. It was an idea shaped by the optimism of the jet age, when speed, altitude and technology were seen not as mere amenities, but as the future of urban life. That building was the Pan Am Building, now known as the MetLife Building, and its rooftop helipad was intended to turn that vision into routine.
A skyscraper built for a different kind of arrival
When the Pan Am Building opened at 200 Park Avenue in 1963, it was envisioned as much more than just an office block. Backed by Pan American World Airways and supported by its president Juan Trippe, the structure was designed to function almost like an extension of the airline, “a city within a city” that could move people as efficiently as planes moved across continents. The building infrastructure reflected that ambition. It includes dozens of high-speed elevators, including a double-deck system and an upper-lobby design that can process thousands of workers and visitors every day. At the top, on the 57th and 58th floors, there was the “Copter Club”, a lounge where passengers could check in, wait and then go straight to the rooftop helipad.
Popular Science, September 1962, image via Wikimedia Commons
The idea was simple: bypass Manhattan’s traffic entirely. Instead of traveling across town to the airport, the airport would effectively come to Midtown.
The helipad starts up, and struggles to survive
Test helicopter operations began in 1965, using Boeing Vertol 107 aircraft operated by New York Airways. From the rooftop, passengers could fly directly to John F. Kennedy Airport and, for a time, Teterboro Airport. This concept worked for a short time. During the transit strike of 1966, when most of New York’s public transportation shut down, rooftop operations reportedly handled about 700 passengers a day. At moments like these, it was a glimpse of what its proponents had envisioned, a multi-level city where ground congestion could be avoided altogether.
New York Airways’ Boeing Vertol 107 helicopters faced persistent Midtown noise complaints, leading to the closure of Pan Am Heliport/ Image: Wikimedia Commons
But the problems were immediate and continuing. The helicopters were loud, creating so much noise that there were frequent complaints from both tenants and neighboring buildings. Demand also fell short of expectations once the novelty wore off and normal transit resumed. By 1968, just three years after it began, the service was discontinued.
Second attempt, and a fatal flaw
Almost a decade later, in early 1977, the helipad reopened. This time, New York Airways operated the Sikorsky S-61 helicopter, a civilian version of the military Sea King. The relaunch was intended to address earlier shortcomings and make the service economically viable. An operational change was at the center of that effort: a process known as “hot loading.” Instead of shutting down the aircraft between flights, helicopters will keep their engines running and rotor blades spinning while passengers disembark and new passengers board. This approach reduced turnaround time, making more flights per day possible, but it also significantly increased the risk.
Service resumed in 1977 with the Sikorsky S‑61L, chosen for its quieter and more efficient operation than earlier Vertol helicopters/ Image: Wikimedia Commons
On May 16, 1977, that risk became catastrophic. At about 5:35 p.m., a Sikorsky S-61 helicopter landed on the roof with its rotors still turning, while passengers had ejected and others waited nearby. A structural failure occurred in the landing gear, later traced by the National Transportation Safety Board to metal fatigue in a critical component. As the landing gear collapsed, the helicopter tilted on its side. The rotating rotor blades hit the deck and were badly broken. Four people waiting to board the roof were killed by the collision and debris. Many others were injured.
debris falling in the city
The damage was not limited to the roof. Fragments of the rotor blades were thrown outward with tremendous force. A large portion fell on the building itself, reportedly hitting a window on an upper floor before breaking apart. Part of the debris traveled down to street level, where it struck and killed a pedestrian, a woman from the Bronx, who was waiting for a bus on Madison Avenue.
Aerial photograph of the wreckage of Flight 972 over the Pan Am Building, May 16, 1977. (Neil Boenzi/The New York Times)
Other fragments were found further away, underscoring the scale and unpredictability of the failure. It was a scene that unfolded simultaneously on two levels of the city, on the rooftop and on the street, and it highlighted the risks of placing active aviation operations above dense urban space.
Why it failed, and what happened next
Investigators determined that the cause of the crash was not pilot error, but structural failure. The NTSB found that a landing gear component made of 7075-T73 aluminum had cracked due to corrosion and repeated stress over time. The defect went unnoticed until it failed under load. The fact that the helicopter was operating under “hot loading” conditions meant that the rotors were still rotating at full speed when the aircraft collapsed, increasing the severity of the incident.The response was immediate, resulting in the permanent closure of the rooftop helipad the same day, after which it was never reopened for commercial service. The accident also marks the end of an era. The high volume of rooftop helicopter traffic in New York effectively stopped, with regulators and city officials shifting operations away from densely built-up areas to coastal heliports, where the risk to people on the ground could be reduced.
A perspective that could not escape reality
The Pan Am Building helipad embodied a specific moment in urban and technological thinking, shaped by the belief that cities could be layered vertically, integrating air travel into everyday movement.In practice, this idea proved unsustainable. Noise, cost, safety, and the realities of operating aircraft in dense urban environments all worked against it.Today the rooftop of the MetLife Building is quiet. The building functions much like any other major commercial tower in New York, a high-end office address that houses large companies, with retail concourses, cafes and everyday amenities woven into its lower levels. Peregrine falcons are also known to nest on its upper reaches, a cool, unexpected use of space that was once built for helicopters. It remains one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks, even though its most ambitious feature is no longer in use.
MetLife Building. Photo by Dmitry Anikin on Unsplash
The company that gave the building its name followed a similarly dramatic turn. Pan American World Airways, once the defining airline of the jet age and a symbol of American global reach, went into a long decline in the decades that followed. It eventually ceased operations in 1991 following financial struggles and industry changes that it could not overcome.Since then there have been periodic attempts to revive the Pan Am name in limited forms, trading on its heritage and cultural significance. No one has restored it to the stature it once had, but the brand is resurgent, with occasional talk of a widespread comeback, with recent developments also hinting at a possible return to the skies, as its current owners have reportedly begun the FAA certification process.
