Founded in 1949 as a mail and cargo carrier headquartered at LaGuardia Airport, New York Airways began carrying passengers on July 9, 1953, likely becoming the first scheduled helicopter airline in the United States. The early fleet consisted of Sikorsky S-55 helicopters, workhorses that gave way to the larger Sikorsky S-58 by 1956 and then to the 15-seat Boeing Vertol V-44 in 1958. By 1962, the airline had transitioned to the twin-turbine Boeing Vertol 107-II and later the Sikorsky S-61, machines powerful enough to maintain the demanding schedule of inter-airport hops and Manhattan rooftop landings. The first scheduled passenger flights to Manhattan arrived in December 1956 at the West 30th Street Heliport, and by 1960 service had shifted to the downtown heliport on East River Pier 6.

In December 1965, New York Airways began something audacious: scheduled helicopter service from the roof of the Pan Am Building -- now the MetLife Building -- in the heart of Midtown. Businessmen could check in at the rooftop counter, board a Sikorsky S-61, and arrive at Pan Am's terminal at JFK in ten minutes. By April 1966, twenty-three daily nonstop flights connected the rooftop to JFK alone, with additional service to LaGuardia and Newark. The airline partnered with 24 international and domestic carriers, turning the building into a de facto urban airport. In June 1964, it was running 32 daily flights between JFK and Newark, all stopping at the Wall Street Heliport. The era also produced a civil rights milestone: on February 5, 1957, Perry H. Young became the first African American airline pilot in the nation, flying for New York Airways after previously making history as one of the first Black civilian flight instructors for the Army's Tuskegee Airmen program.

The dream began unraveling with tragedy. On October 14, 1963, a Boeing Vertol 107 crashed after takeoff from Idlewild, killing all six aboard -- mechanical failure from contaminated lubricants. Then came May 16, 1977: a Sikorsky S-61L sat on the Pan Am Building rooftop, taking on passengers, when its landing gear collapsed. The helicopter toppled onto its side, and the still-spinning main rotor blades tore into the people waiting to board. Four passengers died, including film director Michael Findlay. A shattered blade fragment plummeted to the street below, killing a pedestrian. The rooftop heliport was permanently closed that evening. Barely two years later, on April 18, 1979, another S-61L lost its entire tail rotor gearbox during climbout from Newark at 150 feet -- three more people died in the uncontrolled crash. New York Airways never flew again, filing for bankruptcy on May 18, 1979.

The airline's Boeing Vertol 107s outlasted the company that flew them. All surviving airframes ended up with Columbia Helicopters in Aurora, Oregon, where they continue heavy-lift logging work decades later. One of them, N6674D, holds the record for highest flight hours of any helicopter in the world -- more than 82,000 since its construction in 1962. Another, N6682D, appeared in the 1968 Clint Eastwood film Coogan's Bluff, lifting off from the Pan Am Building rooftop during a sequence that now plays like a time capsule of an era when Manhattan's skyline was a working airfield. The rooftop itself has been bare since 1977, a flat expanse atop the MetLife Building that once hummed with turbine engines and the hope that cities might solve their transportation problems by looking up.