ManhattantotheHamptonsandMontaukbyhelicopter:flighttimesandwhereyouland

From a Manhattan heliport to East Hampton is about 80 nautical miles, roughly 40 minutes in the air. Montauk is about 96, call it 45. Westhampton is about 62, under half an hour. The flight is the easy part. Which of the four East End landing points will actually take your helicopter, on your date, at your hour, is the question worth answering before you book anything.

The air leg barely moves. The drive does.

These are straight-line distances from the three Manhattan pads to the three East End airfields, with air time worked out at the 130-knot cruise a typical charter helicopter holds. Add five to ten minutes for the departure routing out of the city and the arrival pattern at the other end.

Those numbers do not change. The drive does, wildly, which is the entire reason this market exists. The same road trip out Route 27 can take two hours in March and half a day on the Friday before a holiday weekend, and you cannot know which you are getting until you are already in it. Check your own date against New York State’s live traffic service rather than trusting any average.

The catch on the flight side is the ground leg at the far end. Gabreski is the fastest flight and the longest drive, sitting about 25 miles west of East Hampton village with Route 27 in between. Montauk is another 16 nautical miles east and puts you three miles from the village, at the very end of the island. Work out the whole door-to-door number and the right airfield usually picks itself.

You leave from one of three pads, and all three are public use

New York State registers only six public-use heliports. Three of them sit on the edge of Manhattan, which tells you most of what you need to know about how concentrated this is.

• Downtown Manhattan Heliport (JRB), on the East River below Wall Street. The largest of the three pads at 62 by 62 feet, perimeter lit, with a published landing fee.
• West 30th Street (JRA), on the Hudson, a 45-foot pad owned by the Hudson River Park Trust.
• East 34th Street (6N5), on the East River, a 44-foot pad with non-standard lighting.

Which one you use is mostly a question of where your car drops you and what your operator has arranged. The New York metro page in the Heliport Atlas counts 52 registered facilities inside 25 miles of the city and exactly three of them public use, which are the three above. Everything else in that count belongs to a hospital, a police unit, or a company that has no interest in your weekend.

Getting out of the city has its own rulebook. A helicopter leaving a Manhattan pad and heading east usually works its way through the river exclusions below the Class B airspace shelf, where part 93 subpart W of the federal aviation regulations caps indicated airspeed at 140 knots, requires position and anti-collision lights on if the aircraft has them, and makes the pilot self-announce, calling out position and heading on the charted frequency because no controller is sequencing the traffic. Southbound traffic in the Hudson exclusion flies the west shoreline and northbound traffic flies the east, so the river runs like a two-lane road. You will notice this as a slightly slower, lower, chattier first few minutes than you expected. That is normal.

Four places the East End will actually take you

The Hamptons have a landing problem that their reputation hides. For all the money out there, the whole of Long Island, Nassau and Suffolk together, has 30 FAA-registered heliports, and exactly one of them is public use. Nine are hospital pads, which exist for air ambulance work and are not somewhere a charter lands. Seventeen are corporate or private. The pattern is easy to see on the New York state page of the Atlas.

So in practice a charter lands at an airport. There are three of those worth knowing, plus one pad.

East Hampton Town Airport (JPX) is open to the public

This is the one people ask about, because the town spent years trying to make it something else. As of the FAA cycle effective 3 September 2026, the FAA’s own record for JPX lists the field as operational and open to the public, owned by the Town of East Hampton, three miles west of the village.

Its control tower hours run seasonally, staffed 0800 to 2000 and operating from the Saturday before Memorial Day to the Sunday after Labor Day, which is a fair summary of when this market exists at all. The main runway is 4,255 feet of asphalt. Both fuel grades are on the field, 100LL for piston aircraft and Jet A for the turbines that almost every charter helicopter runs on, along with a landing fee for every aircraft, and deer, which the FAA notes in the remarks.

The FAA record also carries a remark telling pilots to check the airport’s own website for current usage rules, noise abatement procedures and regulations before arriving. That remark is doing a lot of work. The town’s rules for its own airport have changed repeatedly and are still being argued over, so the honest instruction is the one the FAA gives: confirm the current conditions close to your date, through an operator who flies here every week, rather than trusting anything written months earlier.

Montauk (MTP) will take a helicopter, if you ask first

Montauk Airport sits three miles northeast of the village, and its touchdown zone elevation is 6.8 feet, which is to say it is essentially on the beach. It is privately owned and open to the public, with one 3,246-foot asphalt runway and no control tower.

Three things from the FAA record for MTP change how you plan a trip here:

1. Helicopters need prior permission to land on the ramp. The FAA remark says so plainly. Helicopter operations from sunset to sunrise are prior permission required as well. Your operator makes that call, but it is a call somebody has to make, and not on the morning of.
2. There is no fuel. Your helicopter arrives carrying enough to get home again or to reach fuel elsewhere, and that reserve competes with passengers and bags for the same weight allowance on the way out.
3. It is attended from 15 April to October, in daylight. Outside that window you are landing at an unattended field at the end of Long Island, which operators will weigh differently.

Montauk in July works on all three counts. Montauk in late November needs the conversation started early.

Southampton Heliport (87N) is the only public pad out here

The Village of Southampton owns the one public-use registered heliport on Long Island. It is a 44-foot asphalt pad, five miles southeast of the village, attended continuously, with a landing fee the FAA publishes by aircraft weight and no fuel.

The FAA record for 87N also carries two remarks that tell you exactly what kind of place this is. The first: noise sensitive area due to houses nearby. The second: no idling or waiting on the helipad permitted. Read that second one carefully if you were picturing the helicopter parked there while you have lunch. It drops you and goes, which turns your day into two flights or a repositioning to an airport, and changes what you are billed under the standby and wait time rules on your quote.

The obstruction list around that pad is a stone wall, a road, a house 230 feet south, brush, a weather tower, two buildings and a dune. It is a small pad in a neighborhood, and it flies like one.

Gabreski (FOK) is the workmanlike option

Francis S. Gabreski Airport in Westhampton Beach is owned by Suffolk County, has a tower open 0700 to 2300, 100LL and Jet A, a 9,002-foot main runway and an Air National Guard unit on the field. It is a real airport with real hours and no seasonal mystery about it, which is why operators like it.

You pay for that in car time. If you are bound for Southampton or Water Mill, the drive is short enough to be worth the certainty. If you are bound for Amagansett, you have flown 30 minutes to sit in the same Route 27 traffic you were trying to skip.

The North Shore route rule expired in July 2026

For years, civil helicopters flying VFR along Long Island’s north shore were required by federal rule to use the published North Shore Helicopter Route. That rule was Subpart H of 14 CFR part 93. It ran from 29 July 2022 to 29 July 2026, and it has not been renewed. the Code of Federal Regulations now carries that slot as reserved, which is the regulatory way of saying the shelf is empty.

Two things follow, and it is worth keeping them apart.

The charted route still exists. It is on the New York Helicopter Route Chart, operators still fly it, and the communities under it still notice aircraft. What ended is the federal mandate to use it between the VPLYD waypoint and Orient Point. Pilots now choose the north shore, the south shore, or over the water on the day, weighing weather, traffic and the noise expectations of whichever facility they are heading into.

For you, as a passenger, this mostly means your routing is less predictable than it was and your operator’s local judgment matters more. It does not mean the Hamptons have stopped caring about helicopter noise. They have not, and an operator who flies this corridor as if the rules changed in their favor is telling you something about how they will handle the rest of your trip.

Friday afternoon is the whole problem

This market runs in one direction at a time. Out on Friday afternoon and evening, back on Sunday afternoon and evening, and in those windows every aircraft and every landing slot on the East End is spoken for at once.

The aircraft you get may not be the aircraft you wanted. Demand for four hours a week and near silence the rest of it is a bad business to hold spare capacity for, so the fleet available on a peak Friday is whatever is already committed to this corridor. If a specific cabin size matters to you, which it does the moment you are counting bags, book further out than feels necessary and read the class comparison before you pick.

Your departure time gets negotiated around everyone else’s. A seasonal tower, a noise-sensitive arrival pad and a queue of aircraft all wanting the same hour add up to less flexibility than an unconstrained market gives you.

Moving off the peak works remarkably well. A Friday morning departure or a Thursday evening one, a Monday morning return instead of Sunday at six, and suddenly there is availability, there is choice of landing point, and the whole day gets calmer.

Fog is what cancels you

Coastal fog on the East End is the weather problem here, and it behaves in a way that surprises people. The city end can be bright and clear while Montauk sits under a low deck that has not moved since dawn. Marine layers form over the cold water and push ashore, and they do not care that you have a dinner reservation.

The National Weather Service office at Upton covers this exact stretch of coast and is the forecast your pilot is looking at too. In summer, watch the marine forecast and the visibility trend rather than the temperature.

The last flight of the day is the riskiest one to depend on, because it has no room behind it for a delay. And a helicopter without an instrument-capable crew and aircraft, on a pad without instrument approaches, is a visual operation, and visual operations stop when you cannot see. The weather and scheduling trade-offs are the same ones every coastal market has, and the honest answer here is to hold a car reservation for the return leg on any trip where Sunday night matters.

Where a helicopter is the wrong answer

Several common East End trips are better served by a car, and one of them is the trip people most often ask for.

A private landing in your own yard. The rules on landing on private property apply out here with unusual force, because East End towns have spent two decades writing local restrictions on exactly this. The Atlas will not help you either: it lists operational FAA-registered heliports only, not airports, and certainly not lawns. A pad that is not registered does not appear, and a registered private pad still needs its owner’s permission.

A single traveler on a normal weekend. You are hiring the whole aircraft. One person going out on a quiet Tuesday in May is paying for a lot of empty seats to save an hour that the Long Island Expressway was not going to take anyway.

A trip that hinges on Sunday night. See the fog. If missing the return means missing a flight out of a New York airport on Monday morning, plan the ground option first and treat the helicopter as the upgrade.

A late arrival at Montauk or Southampton. Sunset to sunrise helicopter operations at Montauk need prior permission, Southampton’s pad sits among houses, and the East Hampton tower closes at eight. This is not a corridor that rewards an improvised 10 p.m. arrival.

Heavy or awkward luggage on a light single. The bags are their own conversation and they get their own page, because golf clubs alone can rearrange an aircraft choice.

When it does work, which is most summer weekends, the exchange is clean: 40 minutes and a car at the other end, against a drive that begins with the Midtown Tunnel and ends whenever it ends. The broader picture of how this market runs across the season is on The Hamptons and Long Island, and the city end of the same corridor is on New York City.

Frequently Asked Questions

Glossary

Nautical mile

The distance unit aviation uses, about 1.15 statute miles. A flight quoted in nautical miles is always a slightly longer trip than the same number of road miles suggests.

Public use

A landing facility open to general traffic under published conditions. Most US heliports are private use and need the owner’s permission before anyone lands.

Prior permission required

A condition on a facility meaning an aircraft may only arrive after the operator has contacted the field and been cleared to come. Montauk applies it to helicopter ramp landings and to all helicopter operations at night.

Class B airspace

The controlled airspace surrounding the busiest airports, shaped like a stack of shelves. The river exclusions below New York’s shelves are what let helicopter traffic move up and down Manhattan without an airliner clearance.

Exclusion

A corridor of airspace carved out beneath controlled airspace, where aircraft operate under a published set of local rules instead of under air traffic control.

VFR

Visual flight rules. Flying by outside reference, which requires the visibility and cloud clearance the rules specify. Coastal fog is what takes that away.

Marine layer

A deck of low cloud or fog formed over cool water and pushed inland. It is the standing summer threat to an East End arrival, and it can sit over Montauk while the city is clear.

Touchdown zone elevation

The height above sea level of the landing surface. Montauk’s is 6.8 feet, which is a numerical way of saying the runway is at the beach.

Landing fee

A charge the facility levies for the landing itself, separate from anything your operator charges. East Hampton, Montauk, Gabreski and Southampton all publish one.

Standby

Ground time with the aircraft shut down and the crew committed to your next leg. What the Southampton pad does not allow, and what an airport does.

Control tower hours

The span when a tower is staffed. East Hampton’s runs seasonally and closes at 2000, so a late arrival is a different operation from a midday one.

Related

• The Hamptons and Long Islandhow the whole market runs across a season, not just the flight out.
• New York Citythe city end of this corridor and the rest of what flies from those three pads.
• Weekend Getawaysthe charter type this route was built for.
• Heliports and Landing Zoneswhat makes a legal landing site, which is why the East End has so few.
• Weather, Delays and Schedulingthe fog conversation, generalized.
• Helicopter standby rateswhat happens to your bill when the aircraft has to wait somewhere else.
• The Heliport Atlasevery operational FAA-registered heliport, including the single public-use pad on Long Island.