Soaring above the maddening crowd

When Bollywood art director Nitin Desai decided to build a new studio in Karjat, the first thing he put in was two helipads. The studio is only an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Mumbai, but with traffic, it takes almost double the time, too much for busy actors and directors who have to juggle meetings and appearances with shooting.

“I wanted to be practical,” says Desai. “I expect a lot of visitors, so I want to make the trip quick and comfortable.” Actor Hrithik Roshan often flies in and out of the Karjat sets on a rented helicopter. Recently, filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra dropped in with actor Ralph Fiennes, as did Rupert Murdoch’s son Lachlan. “The helicopter is the transportation of the future,” says Desai.

In Mumbai, it is the latest way to avoid punishing traffic snarls. Earlier this week, an air marshal of the Indian Air Force was censured for using an officially-chartered helicopter to make a personal trip to Shirdi, but there’s no doubting the convenience of the move.

“India has about 150 rental services — compared with 1,100 in the US — and Mumbai has only a handful. But there is a lot of requirement for this,” says PK Ratta, vice-president (aviation) of Raymond, one of the busiest operators in town.

While companies such as ONGC and Reliance use their own helicopters to ferry staff around, more people are going for what Ratta calls unscheduled, on-shore services — people chartering copters for their individual needs.

For businessman Shankar Gupta, it was about giving his six-year-old son, Sanjeev, the birthday of his life. He did an aerial tour of the city with his spellbound son, and touched down at Santacruz airport an hour later, about Rs80,000 poorer.

Akash Singh surprised his wife on their 10th wedding anniversary by signing on for a joyride. The couple flew over their Juhu neighbourhood, trying to spot friends’ homes and local landmarks, and ended the tour by cutting a cake 10,000 feet above sea level.

Right now, almost every operator in Delhi and Mumbai has been tapped by politicians chartering copters for campaigning in UP. The top users, however, are still corporate honchos.

They rent for anywhere between 5 to 80 hours a month (business is measured by hours in the air). The demand has certainly brought down the charges. One operator says five or 10 years ago, he would have charged anything upwards of Rs2 lakh an hour; now he bills Rs60,000-80,000.

A recent two per cent import duty on choppers and their parts has pushed the prices up, and a common gripe is about not getting enough support from the state.