Bollywood gets its own wings

With two to three movies releasing every week, Bollywood is turning out to be a big market for the non-scheduled operators (NSOPs), who now find themselves booked by film production houses who are increasingly discovering it to be a considerable amount of money and time.

Before the release of Karthik Calling Karthik (KCK), the cast of the movie flew in a charter plane to Ahmedabad, Surat and Delhi within a day to promote the film. With crores riding on every movie, the film producers no longer mind hiring a chopper or a chartered plane for the promotional activities.

“Booking a private plane is very convenient, since we get only 8-10 days for promotion before the release of the film,” said the spokesperson for Excel Entertainment, which produced KCK. “Besides, it comes with a host of benefits as we get to pick up our own cities, route map, and travel timings,” she said.

As a result, NSOPs are now finding themselves extensively booked by Bollywood.  “In the last two months, we were involved in the promotion of films like London Dreams, De Dana Dhan, Delhi 6 and KCK,” said Arjun Bafna of Bafna Aviation, a Mumbai-based NSOP.

Thus, at the price of business class tickets for a cast of seven people, an entire charter can be booked for the day. Seeing this opportunity, Deccan Charters, a Bangalore-based NSOP, wants to make its foray into Mumbai.

“We have done promotions for Sivaji-the Boss (Rajnikanth), Dashavatharam (Kamala Hassan), The Myth (Jackie Chan-starrer), Don (Nagarjuna-starrer),” said Jigar Thaleshwar, senior manager, Deccan Charters, which charters aircrafts for film promotion in the South.

“We now want to be aggressive in Bollywood, and recently we flew Saif Ali Khan from Mumbai to Amby Valley for the promotion of Frito Lays,” he said.