Soaring above the maddening crowd

Mumbai: 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.
“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.
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.
08/04/07 Labonita Ghosh/Daily News & Analysis

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Categories: General Aviation Apr 2007, New Apr 2007