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218     HELICOPTER AIR SERVICE PROGRAM

baggage, from the hotel, which is only a 10-minute walk from the Pan Am Building, to the Pan Am Building so that their guests in their hotel can check their baggage through to Los Angeles, Karachi, or wherever they are going, right in the hotel. They will be taken in this little bus to the Pan Am Building and in 30 seconds, with the elevator, they will be up to the traffic landing facility just under the heliport, and they will be at Kennedy International for their flight to wherever within the space of 7 minutes after they take off with the helicopter.

Senator MONRONEY. How much baggage can you handle without paying for excess?

Mr. CUMMINGS. The same limits that you have on the airlines. We would rather have it otherwise, but because we are dealing 95 percent of our passengers either going to or coming from other airlines, we have the same limits.

Senator MONRONEY. I think you have to have that, because people pack for that limit. Although you pay a great penalty in your limited-load capability, while with the subsonic jets the airlines are getting rich on every piece of excess baggage they can carry.

I think you could practically double the baggage allowance and still have excess space in the belly of the aircraft.

Mr. CUMMINGS. We charge for excess baggage. We have the same excess limits, the same rules.

Senator MONRONEY. I think it is unfortunate that your weight limitation has to be so closely observed by the weight limitation on the subsonic jet, which could be as Senator Maurine Neuberger has been agitating, a lot more for ladies because ladies weigh less than men do, and therefore use less of the weight-lifting capability of the subsonic jets.

You may proceed.

Mr. CUMMINGS. In the New York area we have a bus system today at Kennedy. We hope, as a result of our arrangements with TWA and American and Pan Am, to be able to eliminate that bus system. That also will be a reduction in our total costs.

In the meantime we have no way of doing that. 

Senator MONRONEY: Eliminate?

Mr. CUMMINGS. The bus system we run around Kennedy International.

Senator MONRONEY. I would think, even to the extent of costing something that the airport itself would pay for that bus itself. Certainly I can't excuse the airport. 

Here is this rich, autocratic and bureaucratic New York Port Authority that charges so much to the airlines to land, and charges everybody a fee for almost everything. Why, since Kennedy International is going to become more and more interdependent on helicopter service, I don't see why a few little crumbs couldn't be dropped to the helicopters to help them get along. In other words, if I have to take a helicopter out and I have the hire a bus or taxicab to go from the helipad another 2 miles after I get to Kennedy International - and the reason I do is because the way they designed the field, to put these separate terminals in, it is not a central point as it is at Dulles, therefore I am penalized by having to pay, (a) a taxi fare to the helipad downtown, and the helicopter cost from the helicopter out to the airport, and then if I have to pay another taxi fare from