Reading a reddit comment about helicopter rooftop landings being banned in NYC, apparently following a 1977 accident at the former PanAm building in which 5 people were killed (4 on the rooftop, one on the ground,) my immediate (and frankly, obvious) reaction was “ha, not even the Avengers can land in New York.”
But I didn’t have the details to back up the claim until an awful lot of Googling, so I share them with you now.
First, the Avengers’ jet of choice is called a Quinjet, which you might (?) recognize here:
But probably are more familiar with here from the movies:
These things used to take off from the third floor of Avengers Mansion (I think part of the wall would flip down) but in 1985 the FAA revoked their privileges, as seen in Avengers 261. So they got 8 more years than the non-super people did in their helicopters, though this change wasn’t due to an accident as much as blowback from an overall loss of security clearance, I think because the Vision tried to take over the world a few months before.
The Mighty Avengers had to trek over to something called Hydrobase (which at one point was the HQ of the evil Doctor Hydra because comics) to launch from that point onwards. Well, “for a time,” anyway, according to everything I read. But when did they get their flight capabilities restored?
As near as I can tell, it was around 1991 or maybe 1992. Around that time, the Avengers got a charter from the UN (as seen in Avengers 329) which presumably came with some power. They also just finished rebuilding Avengers Mansion, which had been badly damaged or destroyed a while back in a, uh, final battle.
While I didn’t find any direct references to Quinjets around this time, there’s a mention in 1992’s classic (?) New Warriors 22 where the New Warriors plan to steal one from the Avengers’ headquarters. So my best guess is the UN charter combined with a new mansion (and maybe a short memory on the constantly changing creative team around that era) led to a restoration of flight privileges. I’m going with that anyway.
Siri totally should have been able to answer this for me.