New York Airways
former helicopter airline (USA)
New York Airways was an American helicopter airline in the New York City area, founded in 1949 as a mail and cargo carrier. On 8 July 1953 it may have been the first scheduled helicopter airline to carry passengers in the United States, with headquarters at LaGuardia Airport. Although primarily a helicopter airline operator with scheduled passenger operations, New York Airways also flew fixed wing aircraft, such as the de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter 19-passenger STOL twin turboprop aircraft.
History
Passenger flights started with Sikorsky S-55 helicopters, with three Sikorsky S-58s added to its five S-55s in 1956; in 1958 the Boeing Vertol V-44, a 15-seat civil version of the Piasecki H-21, took over. In 1962 they transitioned to the tandem rotor, twin turbine engine powered Boeing Vertol 107-II Turbocopter and later operated the twin turbine engine Sikorsky S-61. In February 1955 the one-way fare from LaGuardia to Idlewild was $4.50 ($54 in 2025 dollars). The aircraft was a Sikorsky H-19, registration number N418A. The trip took ten minutes and their phone number was DEfender 5-6600.
The first scheduled passenger flights to Manhattan arrived in December 1956 at the West 30th Street Heliport. The downtown heliport on East River Pier 6 opened in 1960 and New York Airways moved all its Manhattan passenger flights down there around December 1960. Due to route restrictions on the single-engine Vertol 44, nonstop flights from Manhattan to Idlewild (JFK) had to await the twin-engine Boeing Vertol 107.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3339040. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1953, 1956 and 1958.
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This entry incorporates text from “New York Airways” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.