Among all the good and bad travel associations it can call up, the term airport generally encourages the image of an airplane to taxi into the mind’s eye. This is of course as it should be, as airplane flights are the very business of airports; while airports remain the overwhelming choice of pilots as places at which to take off and land in their airplanes.

But fixed-wing aircraft do not constitute the airport’s only mode of sweeping passengers into the burning blue, as both blimps and – more often – helicopters also come and go from the modern urban aeroport.

Helicopters, while not taxi-ing into the mind's eye as readily as airplanes, do provide air passengers with the benefit of being able to take off and land just about anywhere. In fact – it could be said that this capability is at the core of their very purpose. As such, helicopters can leave an airport and travel – limited only by range – to any place from the famous helipad that sits atop midtown New York’s Pan Am building to a Borneo jungle clearing marked only by a flare from a fly-specked oil barrel.

Most folks opt for the former scenario as helicopters serve airports (and the heliports they often contain) by conveying passengers quickly and safely to destinations in outlying areas. The advantage of flying by helicopter from airport to ultimate destination and back lies with the fact that airborne choppers are far faster than road-bound Chevys when it comes to making the run. In this way, for example, the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in New York provides scheduled service to John F. Kennedy International Airport while also being used by those with means as a way of traveling to -- or sending goods to -- destinations as far away as Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Maryland. 

Airport helicopters can also provide an invaluable service in transporting stricken travelers to one of hundred of hospitals and medical centers having helipads.