The New York City landmark previously 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. The CEO of Pan Am, Juan Trippe, wanted to make a properly big deal of his massive new NYC headquarters. Although resembling a tombstone, architect types 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, glittering moment in the 1960s and a tragically short revival in 1977, New York Airways (NYA) partnered with Pan Am and operated a scheduled helicopter airline right off the roof of the Pan Am Building. It was really a flex of corporate dominance — who else could say they shuttle passengers from the rooftop of their headquarters, en route to their airplanes? Shuttling passengers from Manhattan directly to JFK International was an idea that was actually ahead of its time, but for unfortunate reasons.
Unfortunately, and tragically, the dream of a Jetsons-esque city came to a halt on May 16th, 1977. A mechanical failure atop the roof of 200 Park Ave. took the lives of passengers, rained debris down to the streets below, and even took the life of a bystander who was waiting for the bus.
The city within a city
Before it became the site of a tragedy, the Pan Am Building was essentially a monument to ego. Opening in 1963, it was the largest commercial office building in the world by square foot. It’s an octagonal slab that critics immediately hated for blocking the view of Park Avenue, but Pan Am President Trippe didn’t care about your view. The building was dubbed “a city within a city,” boasting a then-largest HVAC system ever installed in a skyscraper, and 65 high-speed elevators to move a trove of employees as well as visitors.
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, have a martini while looking down on the ants crawling along 42nd, and theoretically not touch your luggage again until you landed at your destination — maybe London in this case.
For a while, it worked. During a transit strike in 1966, the roof was moving 700 passengers a day who were desperate to escape the halted public transit system. But even then, the writing was on the wall — or rather, the noise was in the ears. The original Vertol helicopters were so loud that tenants and neighbors complained incessantly, leading to the service’s first shutdown in 1968.
Let’s talk about hot loading
When the service relaunched in 1977, the powers that be insisted things would be different. One change was the hardware — they switched to the Sikorsky S-61L, a version of the military’s Sea King. To make the economics work, New York Airways employed a procedure known as “hot loading.” If you know anything about aviation safety, that phrase probably makes your skin crawl.
To hot load, the pilots keep the engines running at full tilt and the massive 62-foot rotor blades spinning while passengers embark and disembark between flights. The idea was to minimize turnaround time and maximize how many flights they could do in a day. In the airline business, a bird on the ground is losing money, and this was still a business at the end of the day.
On the afternoon of May 16, 1977, Flight 972 landed on the rooftop, engines running as the twenty or so passengers disembarked the craft while a fresh group of passengers waited to board. The helicopter’s blades were still whirling at speed. The design left little margin for error. Unfortunately, the machine was about to fail.
Metallurgy will get the best of you, sooner or later
The crash wasn’t caused by pilot error. It wasn’t Mother Nature — it was Father Physics. The Sikorsky S-61L sat on a tricycle landing gear, and the main gear had a flaw. As outlined in a report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the upper right forward fitting was made of 7075-T73 aluminum, a metal chosen for its resistance to stress corrosion cracking. However, it wasn’t immune to good old fashioned fatigue. A small surface pit, likely caused by simple corrosion from water getting inside the hollow strut, had allowed a crack to propagate over hundreds of landings.
At 5:35 PM, the strut snapped. The helicopter lost its support to the landing deck on the right side and rolled over. Because the rotors were still spinning at speed — thanks to that hot loading protocol — the blades smashed into the deck. Four passengers waiting on the roof were killed by fragmentation, and several others were injured — maybe this is a good time to note that this is taking place on a skyscraper, and so of course things snowballed.
A large section of the rotor blade was launched over the side of the building. The section smashed into the 39th floor before crashing into the street below and killing a woman who was simply waiting for the bus.
The Pan Am ban
The aftermath was immediate and permanent. The helipad on top of the Pan Am Building was permanently closed that very day and never reopened for commercial traffic. The disaster exposed a massive gap in the safety philosophy of the era — specifically, the safe-life limits (think of this as expected life hours) on aircraft parts versus the damage-tolerance capabilities (the ability to withstand flaws). 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. Regulatory bodies and city officials instituted a de facto ban on high-volume rooftop heliports, pushing commercial helicopter operations to the waterfront — where a failure, such as the crash earlier this year that killed a Spanish businessman and his family, is more likely to end up in the river, not on the people on the street below.
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 reality that gravity always wins, eventually. So, the next time you’re stuck in traffic on the Van Wyck, just remember, it beats dodging rotor blades on Madison Avenue. Pan Am ultimately filed for bankruptcy in 1991, but recent news hints at the brand’s return — hopefully with some better decision making at the helm this go-around.
