For one sickening moment on May 16, 1977, the crowded streets around Grand Central Terminal became a war zone.
Chunks of steel and razor-sharp shards of glass whirled in a deadly downpour at Madison Avenue and 43rd Street, hurled there by a chopper that had collapsed on a landing pad atop the Pan Am Building.
Five people were killed and eight were injured as the New York Airways helicopter keeled over on a broken landing gear, snapping off a rotor blade that became a deadly missile to anyone in its way.
Four people on the rooftop died – three instantly – and one woman on the ground was fatally struck by a chunk of the missile that finally came to rest 59 stories and one block away in the middle of the evening rush hour.
Bits of bodies mangled by the flying debris were scattered in sickening disarray.
“The blades hit them and everything went everywhere – backs, legs, heads,” said Deputy Police Commissioner Frank McLoughlin.
It was a nightmarish end to a decade-long controversy over rooftop helicopter service at what has since become the MetLife Building.
And for one spectator to the ghastly carnage, it was war all over again.
D-Day vet Tom Clarke, walking six inches away from 29-year-old accountant Anne Barnecott, remembered hearing a “thud” at 5:30 p.m.
Then screams.
“She screamed and fell to the ground,” he said.
“I heard another woman crying, ‘Help me! Help me! She was bleeding pretty badly from her arm and a leg. … I half carried, half dragged her into a doorway. I could tell I wouldn’t be able to help the woman who screamed.”
Clarke began doing what the war had taught him.
“I had to keep [the survivor] talking to keep her from going into shock,” he said.
“That’s when you lose them. She kept saying, ‘I’m gonna die.’ I said, ‘No, you’re too pretty to die. You’re gonna be all right.’ She took it like a soldier. I’ll tell you, she stayed right with me.”
“Everybody on the street stood silently looking at the woman, thinking, ‘This could have been me,'” said the Rev. William Shelly of St. Agnes Church, who was one of the hundreds of pedestrians who watched in horror as the young Bronx woman crumbled to the ground.
One passenger who had just debarked from the chopper, journalist Paul Vante, speculated that had he “stayed on this copter another two minutes, I would probably have been dead.”
Firefighters, ambulance drivers and paramedics had to lug their rescue gear up the last nine flights of the office tower when elevators abruptly stopped at the 50th floor.
Nearby, on Vanderbilt Avenue at 44th Street, a Long Island resident was sitting in his car when the skies rained debris.
“I looked up. All I could see was garbage, debris, blue pieces of paper, glass and stone falling,” he said. “People were running everywhere for cover.”
Investigators for the National Transportation Safety Board discovered the problem with the chopper was its landing-gear fitting, possibly caused by metal fatigue.