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HELICOPTER AIR SERVICE PROGRAM     323

Mr. Chairman, my name is John R. Wiley. I appear here on behalf of the Port of New York Authority which is the joint agency of the States of New York and New Jersey, and charged by them with responsibility for the development of terminal, transportation, and other facilities of commerce on a financially self-supporting basis and the promotion and protection of the trade and commerce of the Port of New York District, the area included within a 25-mile radius of the Statue of Liberty.

Your subcommittee is considering the question "Whether the Govermnent [[Government]] shoud [[should]] continue, expand or limit the federally supported helicopter air service program." It is the view of the Port of New York Authority that the federally supported program shoud [[should]] be continued for a further period sufficiently long to give the helicopter carriers a reasonable opportunity to reach a break-even point their operations. 

The Port Authority is deeply concerned about the future of scheduled helicopter service. The New York metropolitan area has enjoyed scheduled helicopter service, provided by New York Airways, one of the pioneers in the field, for the last 11 years.

Throughout those years, the Port Authority has joined with the Civil Aeronautics Board and New York Airways in fostering the development of that service in the New York area.

We have invested our funds and our planning efforts in providing facilities to make the service possible and to make it attractive to the public. As we understand it, we are now faced with possible curtailment or cessation of that service because of a threatened cutoff of Federal subsidy support.

We are convinced that the efforts of all concerned have brought the industry close to the day when it can subsist on its own. Under the circumstances, we believe that the threatened immediate cutoff of Federal support would be a disservice to the public and to all those who have expended time and money in the work already done.

We, in the port authority, are convinced that rather than the destruction of what has gone before, the public will best be served by implementation of the Civil Aeronautics Board's plan, encompassed in that Board's recent show cause orders (as to New York Airways, see Order No. E-21799), to phase out Federal subsidy for helicopter airlines over the next 5 years.

The port authority has long been convinced that helicopter service could and should play an important part in the transportation picture of the New York-New Jersey metropolitan area. The Port of New York District, itself, is uniquely adapted to transportation by helicopter, by reason of its size, unusual geography, tremendous concentration of population and commerce, volume of air traffic, multiple airport system, surface traffic congestion problems and steady trend toward suburbanization.

Scheduled helicopter operations are especially important in providing service to and from and between the region's terminal airport: John F. Kennedy International, LaGuardia, and Newark.

(Scheduled helicopter service is presently suspended at LaGuardia, which is undergoing complete reconstruction, but we look forward to its early resumption when the reconstruction is completed and fixed-wing passenger volume again provides a sufficient market to warrant helicopter service.)

The New York and New Jersey airports are located at a considerable distance from each other and all are separated by various topographical barriers to surface travel from the center of the traffic generating areas they serve, particularly Manhattan Island. (See attached map.)

This factor, combined with the increasingly heavy vehicular traffic at peak hours, creates surface travel delays. The helicopter or other vertically rising aircraft with an ability to fly over the surface traffic and topographical barriers is the ideal vehicle to surmount these problems of time and urban geography.

Increasing public acceptance and use of the service demonstrates this fact. In a survey conducted by the port authority for a 12-month period in 1056-57 results show that of the passengers departing on domestic flights from Kennedy Airport whose trip origin was west of the Hudson River (principally in New Jersey), 2 percent or 1 out of every 50 of these passengers used New York Airways to get to Kennedy Airport.

In a similar survey conducted during 12 months in 1963-64, 20 percent or one out of every five air passengers departing Kennedy Airport on domestic flights who originated their trips west of the Hudson River used New York Airways to get to Kennedy Airport.