New York. Teterboro to Midtown in about half an hour, the crossing chosen for the hour you land.

Teterboro is the default for New York because nothing else combines proximity with that much business aviation capacity. Its constraint is weight: since 1977 aircraft over 100,000 lb have not been able to take off from the field, which quietly excludes some of the heaviest ultra long range types on a transatlantic load. If you are crossing from London on the biggest metal, that single rule may decide your airport for you, and it is worth settling before anything else is booked. See Teterboro and the Teterboro private terminals.

Westchester County Airport at White Plains is the sensible alternative for anyone whose destination is Greenwich, Rye, Bedford or northern Westchester, and it is often quieter on the ground. Morristown in New Jersey and Essex County at Caldwell take pressure off Teterboro in peak weeks. Republic Airport at Farmingdale is the Long Island field and the obvious one for the Hamptons. Newark, Kennedy and LaGuardia all handle private arrivals too, and Kennedy is sometimes the right answer for an arrival that continues on a scheduled flight, but none of them is quicker into Manhattan than Teterboro on a normal afternoon.

A helicopter from Teterboro to a Manhattan heliport is a matter of minutes in the air, against thirty to ninety on the road. It is not always the right call: there is a transfer at each end, weather and visibility have to hold, and the city's heliports have their own hours and noise rules. On a clear weekday afternoon in September, with the United Nations in session and the East Side in gridlock, it is often the only sane way to make a six o'clock meeting. On a quiet Sunday morning the car is simpler and no slower.

Of the three public heliports, West 30th Street on the Hudson is the one that operates twenty four hours, Downtown Manhattan sits on the East River at Pier 6 for the Financial District, and East 34th Street serves Midtown East and the UN district. We book the aircraft, the slot and both cars as one movement, so nobody is standing on a pier with luggage waiting for a driver to find them. See helicopter charter.

New York has a handful of weeks that need to be planned differently. The General Assembly in late September brings motorcades and rolling street closures across Midtown East. The autumn and spring fashion weeks scatter shows across Manhattan and Brooklyn on a schedule that changes daily. The Met Gala closes Fifth Avenue on the first Monday in May. The US Open fills the Grand Central Parkway out to Flushing Meadows for a fortnight at the end of the summer, and the auction weeks in May and November put the whole art world in the same twenty blocks.

We plan those weeks backwards from the meeting, not forwards from the aircraft: what time you must be in the room, what the roads will be doing, and therefore when the wheels go up. If that means an earlier flight or a different field, we say so in the quote rather than after the event.