Viewing page 333 of 507

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

324     HELICOPTER AIR SERVICE PROGRAM

This very substantial increase in the use of the helicopter in recent 7-year period is a graphic example of the need for such service. It results, we believe from the fact that this particular type of aircraft can what does surmount these problems of time and urban geography. 

Surface travel delays getting to and from airports in the New York region are not going to get any better. Our estimates show that ground travel times between the region's airports and between Manhattan and the airports will be as great or greater in 1975 than they are today.

This prospect, coupled with the probable advent of the supersonic aircraft in a decade from now, seems to validate the often stated probability that ground travel times at the ends of a supersonic flight may exceed the time consumed in the air.

However, with or without supersonics, we estimate that the region's air passenger volume in 1975 will be almost double what it was in 1964. The matter of how some 41 million air passengers are going to get to and from the airport without inordinate delay in 1975 is of serious concern to us.

Indeed, it is a serious matter with today's traffic. Helicopter service experience to date demonstrates that it can overcome excessive ground travel times and increasing public acceptance demonstrates that it is and will continue to be an attractive alternate to bumper-to-bumper travel to and from an airport.

We are, therefore, convinced that an increasingly significant amount of airport-to-city center and airport-to-airport transfer passengers will use helicopter service.

In this connection, I might note that the majority of the air passengers moving through our region's three major airports are not residents of our own metropolitan area. A large share of our helicopter passengers reside outside of the region.

In a survey conducted during a 1-week period in 1963, some 3 thousand New York Airways passengers responded to a question of residence. The survey results indicate that the passengers resided in 43 States and the District of Columbia, in addition to New York and New Jersey, and in 29 foreign countries.

New York is not only a major air traffic generating point but is also an important connecting point for air passengers. Because the region's volume of air traffic requires a multiple airport system, there are a substantial number of air passengers moving through the region who are required not only to change aircraft, but also use more than one of the airports in New York/Newark.

In a 12-month survey in 1963-64, 63 percent or almost two out of every three of these transfer passengers arriving at Kennedy and departing Newark or vice versa used New York Airways for their interairport transfer. 

In a similar survey conducted in 1956-57, 16 percent or one out of every six transfer passengers between John F. Kennedy and Newark used the helicopter. This vastly increased reliance on the helicopter by air passengers who neither originate or terminate their trip in the New York area demonstrates that New York Airway's operation is not simply a local service, but is truly national and international from the standpoint of the origins of the passengers carried.

There is another aspect of the New York Airways past and potential future service which we believe is of major significance. As the committee may be aware, the actual service authorized by the Civil Aeronautics Board covers a much larger area than the interairport and city center service now actually being operated. 

The carrier is authorized to, and has, in the past, prior to subsidy reductions, provided service between various points in a so-called exemption area embraced by the peripheral points of Trenton, N.J.; Dover, N.J.; Peekskill, N.Y.; Danbury, Conn.; New Haven, Conn.; Farmingdale, N.Y.; Freeport, N.Y., and Asbury Park, N.J.

The area encompassed between these points is a major segment of the highly urbanized east coast megalopolis. The need for and value of helicopter service here in the future seem quite obvious to us.

To foreclose the ability of New York Airways to continue the services now being operated for a sufficiently long period to permit the carrier to reach self-support, of course, will also foreclose any foreseeable possibility for resumption of their service in this tristate exemption area.

Because of the Port Authority's convictions as to the role that vertically rising aircraft should and must play in the future of air transportation, its efforts in fostering the development of this mode of intraregional transportation have taken a very practical form.

As the regional transportation agency of the States of New York and New Jersey, we have invested substantial sums of public money to provide Manhattan