Pan Am Tried A Rooftop Airport Hub In NYC, And The Result Was A Fatal Mistake – Jalopnik

The New York City landmark beforehand generally known as The Pan Am Building — now the MetLife Building — has a protracted and storied historical past. It was the Sixties, with an abundance of jet-age optimism. The CEO of Pan Am, Juan Trippe, needed to make a correctly large deal of his large new NYC headquarters. Although resembling a tombstone, architect sorts would say the design is a mixture of Bauhaus and brutalist. 

The concept was easy: bypass the gridlock of the road by turning a skyscraper right into a 59-story jetway. For a short, glittering second within the Sixties and a tragically brief revival in 1977, New York Airways (NYA) partnered with Pan Am and operated a scheduled helicopter airline proper off the roof of the Pan Am Building. It was actually a flex of company dominance — who else may say they shuttle passengers from the rooftop of their headquarters, en path to their airplanes? Shuttling passengers from Manhattan on to JFK International was an concept that was really forward of its time, however for unlucky causes. 

Unfortunately, and tragically, the dream of a Jetsons-esque metropolis got here to a halt on May sixteenth, 1977. A mechanical failure atop the roof of 200 Park Ave. took the lives of passengers, rained particles right down to the streets under, and even took the lifetime of a bystander who was ready for the bus.

Before it grew to become the location of a tragedy, the Pan Am Building was primarily a monument to ego. Opening in 1963, it was the most important business workplace constructing on the planet by sq. foot. It’s an octagonal slab that critics instantly hated for blocking the view of Park Avenue, however Pan Am President Trippe did not care about your view. The constructing was dubbed “a city within a city,” boasting a then-largest HVAC system ever put in in a skyscraper, and 65 high-speed elevators to maneuver a trove of staff in addition to guests.

To promote such a high-flying life-style, they did not simply throw a windsock on the roof and name it a day. The 57th and 58th flooring had been the Copter Club — a lounge that was extra airport terminal than ready room. You may test your baggage in Midtown, have a martini whereas wanting down on the ants crawling alongside forty second, and theoretically not contact your baggage once more till you landed at your vacation spot — possibly London on this case.

For some time, it labored. During a transit strike in 1966, the roof was shifting 700 passengers a day who had been determined to flee the halted public transit system. But even then, the writing was on the wall — or fairly, the noise was within the ears. The unique Vertol helicopters had been so loud that tenants and neighbors complained incessantly, resulting in the service’s first shutdown in 1968.

When the service relaunched in 1977, the powers that be insisted issues could be totally different. One change was the {hardware} — they switched to the Sikorsky S-61L, a model of the army’s Sea King. To make the economics work, New York Airways employed a process generally known as “hot loading.” If something about aviation security, that phrase in all probability makes your pores and skin crawl.

To sizzling load, the pilots preserve the engines working at full tilt and the large 62-foot rotor blades spinning whereas passengers embark and disembark between flights. The concept was to reduce turnaround time and maximize what number of flights they may do in a day. In the airline enterprise, a chook on the bottom is dropping cash, and this was nonetheless a enterprise on the finish of the day.

On the afternoon of May 16, 1977, Flight 972 landed on the rooftop, engines working because the twenty or so passengers disembarked the craft whereas a contemporary group of passengers waited to board. The helicopter’s blades had been nonetheless whirling at pace. The design left little margin for error. Unfortunately, the machine was about to fail.

The crash wasn’t brought on by pilot error. It wasn’t Mother Nature — it was Father Physics. The Sikorsky S-61L sat on a tricycle touchdown gear, and the principle gear had a flaw. As outlined in a report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the higher proper ahead becoming was fabricated from 7075-T73 aluminum, a metallic chosen for its resistance to emphasize corrosion cracking. However, it wasn’t resistant to good quaint fatigue. A small floor pit, possible brought on by easy corrosion from water getting contained in the hole strut, had allowed a crack to propagate over tons of of landings.

At 5:35 PM, the strut snapped. The helicopter misplaced its assist to the touchdown deck on the suitable facet and rolled over. Because the rotors had been nonetheless spinning at pace — due to that sizzling loading protocol — the blades smashed into the deck. Four passengers ready on the roof had been killed by fragmentation, and several other others had been injured — possibly it is a good time to notice that that is happening on a skyscraper, and so in fact issues snowballed.

A big part of the rotor blade was launched over the facet of the constructing. The part smashed into the thirty ninth ground earlier than crashing into the road under and killing a girl who was merely ready for the bus.

The aftermath was speedy and everlasting. The helipad on high of the Pan Am Building was completely closed that very day and by no means reopened for business site visitors. The catastrophe uncovered an enormous hole within the security philosophy of the period — particularly, the safe-life limits (consider this as anticipated life hours) on plane elements versus the damage-tolerance capabilities (the flexibility to resist flaws). New York Airways struggled to limp alongside, however after one other accident at Newark International Airport in 1979, it filed for chapter.

The crash successfully ended the period of rooftop commuting in New York City. Regulatory our bodies and metropolis officers instituted a de facto ban on high-volume rooftop heliports, pushing business helicopter operations to the waterfront — the place a failure, such because the crash earlier this yr that killed a Spanish businessman and his household, is extra prone to find yourself within the river, not on the folks on the road under.

Today, the roof of the MetLife Building sits empty. It’s a grim reminder of the Icarus Paradox — human ambition to fly and the mechanical actuality that gravity at all times wins, finally. So, the following time you are caught in site visitors on the Van Wyck, simply keep in mind, it beats dodging rotor blades on Madison Avenue. Pan Am in the end filed for chapter in 1991, however latest information hints on the model’s return — hopefully with some higher choice making on the helm this go-around.