Varun Verma (name changed on request), a 45-year old chemical engineer, has been making a grueling weekly road trip from his Nepeansea Road home to Vapi where his chemical unit is based for past 12 years. But not anymore, he has discovered chopper pooling.
"It is a nine hour journey to and fro. I leave home by 6 am and return on the same day by 11 pm as the facilities for overnight stay in Vapi are not very good,'' said Verma. So when he had to ferry a German team from Mumbai to his factory he had to hire a helicopter. But the Rs 2 lakh bill told him flying to work can't become a habit.
The idea of chopper pooling took root a few months later when he attended a seminar where he realised he could buy a seat rather than book an entire chopper. And since May, Verma has been helicopter pooling a Bell 407 twice a month—all he had to do was knock on the doors of neighbouring factories and speak to their owners.
"Two of my helicopter partners live in Juhu, two in South Mumbai and so the helicopter picks up the suburban passengers from Juhu airport around 7.15 am and they reach Mahalaxmi helipad by 7.30 am where we three board and by the time we are done with sharing nuts, munchies we have landed at the private helipad in Vapi and its only 8.20 am yet," said Verma.
From there, in 10 minutes he is at his chemical unit in Vapi. The trip costs each passenger Rs 40,000 but for that amount they get rid of Mumbai's sadistic roads and traffic and saves them seven hours per return trip. Given that these entrepreneurs make the factory trip at least once a week, substituting car with a helicopter pool works out to Rs 19 lakh/passenger for twelve months and a saving of 336 hours or 14 days per year.
"Helicopter pool is value for money as now I get to spend six to seven hours in the factory per visit, when earlier I hardly got 2-3 hours. So I have cut down the frequency of my factory visits by half, to two times a month," said Verma.
The savings are bigger for Arun Sanghi (name changed), who owns a pharmaceutical manufacturing unit in Boisar, an industrial zone in Thane, as his flying time is less. His helicopter pool works out to Rs 20,000 per return trip. He and his brother travel from their Juhu home to their factory twice a week, and its only once in 7-10 days that they do the helicopter pool. "It works out to Rs 6-7 lakh per annum and we are a Rs 300 crore company, we can well afford it. And it is not even a capital expense," says Sanghi.
"There is this aura around the use of private aircraft, but from utility perspective, spending for directors Rs 7 lakh each a year is not much," he added.
But that is the mental block that many found hard to navigate. "Our target customer was anyone with a factory in a remote location, aged between 35-45, with a business volume of Rs 50-100 crore, we did not go for the ultra rich," says Rajiv Wadhwa, CEO, Baron Luxury and Lifestyles, the company which in co-ordination with licensed aircraft charter operators has been providing helicopters for pool for a year now. They had problems selling the concept of flying to work to many entrepreneurs.
"Azim Premji came as a huge hurdle. Entrepreneurs said when Premji does not fly business aircraft, why should we? We may have the money, but we want to be grounded. That was the popular sentiment," said Wadhwa. The fact that the pompous name of their aircraft charter company would have only entrenched these beliefs deeper is lost on him. "We had to do a cost-benefit analysis of their time," he added. Some decided to give it a try and so far, the company claims, they have done 250-300 hours of helicopter pool flights within Maharashtra in the past one year.
Capt Uday Gelli of Rotor Wing Society of India said: "The concept of helicopter pool has been tried in the past too, it failed as it was not possible to co-ordinate and synchronise the schedules of passengers." The current experiment seems to have worked so far as Verma pointed out that all of them were factory owners and so they make their own schedules.
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