$5 according to the YouTube documentary posted in your sibling comment.

Wow, that is extremely cheap!

I haven’t had time to watch the documentary yet, but my first thought about a $5 price tag is that it can’t possibly be accounting for inflation.

$5 in 1977 is about $21.15 give or take a few cents according to most of the website i checked the numbers on.

So while it might be $5, that was definitely not as cheap as it might otherwise seem.

Regardless of the inflation adjustments, ~$20 is surprisingly inexpensive for a commuter helicopter ride, I wonder if the economies of scale really do bring it down or if they were still eating their losses trying to grow business at that price.

Thanks for doing the math. $20 is still so cheap as to warrent a "Wow, that is incredibly cheap" IMHO.

Taxi flat rate from Manhatten to JFK is over $50. How the price for a helicopter ride could be on the same order of magnitude as a taxi is beyond me.

The flat rate has only been in effect for several years. I would assume it would be a lot more expensive to take a taxi from midtown directly to JFK before the flat rate.

> So while it might be $5, that was definitely not as cheap as it might otherwise seem.

An uber to JFK from Manhatten is ~$100 - that's still dirt cheap!

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Airways) it was 4,5$ in '55 (~43$ in 2019). The helicopter fit 15 passengers and the trip took 10 minutes. If you assume a ride every 30 minutes at ~half capacity for 8 hours, that's 16843=5504$ a day. If you can keep that up all day every day, that's a bit over 2M$ a year today. It's certainly not that much, but doable.