About five times a month, Airlogic Aviation Solutions , a charter flight company in New Delhi, gets bookings from villagers in Sirohi and Jalore in Rajasthan. They book planes and helicopters to fly over newly constructed Jain temples and shower flowers over these places of worship.Ahmedabad-based businessman Sunil Patel booked a helicopter last month and joined a set of like-minded people, including some villagers, to shower flowers on the Ramdev temple in Peepligaon, Gujarat. Patel believes that the gods need to be appeased in all ways.Hiring planes and helicopters is no longer the preserve of politicians or the rich and famous. In the smaller towns and the villages, chartering aircraft has become a status symbol.To shower flowers on temples from the skies, a helicopter usually takes four passengers at a time. They carry 10-12 kg of flowers with them, which are released from open windows above the temple. The seats are sold for Rs 25,000 for those who want to ride first and cost Rs 15,000 for the third or fourth ride of the day. “This has become common and we have seen our business grow four times in the last few years,” said Manish Dhiman, director of Airlogic Aviation, which started four years ago.The skies are getting dotted with private aircraft, chartered planes and helicopters ferrying industrialists, lawyers, business doyens, doctors and wedding guests. During elections and rallies, politicians travel to the interior regions on choppers, which are also huge crowd pullers.People from smaller towns and villages in Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana are ready to spend Rs 2 lakh-6 lakh for two-hour trips by helicopter. They would rather charter a plane than travel through poor roads to the nearest airport and wait for connecting flights, say aircraft operators.For some like non-resident Indian Harkisan Singh, arriving in a helicopter for his wedding in Navshar village in Hoshiarpur meant the event would get talked about for years.In the cities, too, regular users are increasingly chartering aircraft and not always for work-related reasons. During the recent Jat agitation in Haryana, Rajiv Luthra, managing partner of Delhi-based Luthra & Luthra Law Offices, hired a private plane to get his family out of their home in Kasauli in Himachal Pradesh back to Gurgaon. Luthra has often used chartered air carriers in the US, Europe and sometimes even in India.“For a court session at 10.30 am in Chandigarh or Jabalpur, my senior associates and I cannot land up at 7 am. We take a chartered aircraft at 9 am and reach there on time for the session. It is very convenient and should become more prevalent in India,” said Luthra.His firm uses these services regularly when clients come in from abroad. Luthra also recounts how he flew from Atlanta to New York in an hour and a half for a meeting using these carriers. “If we have seatsharing like those available abroad, then flying using chartered planes can be very convenient, no airport hassles and not very expensive,” added Luthra.There are 550 aircraft in the general and business aviation categories, which are used for charter flights, according to the New Delhi-based Business Aircraft Operators Association. Although more queries are pouring in from customers, regulatory hurdles prevent this mode transport from being used like those in the US and Europe.Depending on the aircraft make, operating a two-hour flight could cost a few lakh rupees. In addition, handling and parking charges make it an expensive proposition for new entrants. While some operators own their own planes, others act as a liaison between the aircraft owners and customers.Baron Aviation & Allied Services, an air charter services provider, has rolled out an online platform, Bookmycharter, which connects customers to multiple private operators.Seats can be purchased on an aircraft being sent from New Delhi to Jaipur, where a customer has booked the plane for a trip to Mumbai. If seats are sold on the Delhi-Jaipur route, the main customer may get a discount.“Sometimes the seats were as low as Rs 10,000-15,000, which is as good as a businessclass seat in a commercial plane,” said Arun Lohiya, president of Baron Aviation. “It is similar to production in a factory. We have already paid for the machinery, so why not run it in two shifts?”“There has been a 20-25% increase in business over the past year. Clients today are companies interested in investing in startups, multinationals setting up operations and industrialists traveling to Raipur , Ranchi, Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh ,” said Bhupesh Joshi, CEO of Club One Air, one of the largest charter operators in the country.An increase in organ transplantation and medical evacuation has also seen helicopters being booked in remote areas of Chhattisgarh and even small firms are seeing their seats booked for medical emergencies.“We run 12 flights a month and have seen doctors book the planes because there are more cases of organ transplant,” said Dhiman of Airlogic Aviation.There have been instances of lawyers booking planes to shuttle from Kolkata to Bagdogra in Darjeeling district, travelling along with their team of assistants and 12-14 suitcases filled with files. “They said it gives them the flexibility to move from high courts to clients’ offices,” added Dhiman.India Fly Safe Aviation, a non-scheduled air transportation company, has business houses Jindal Group , JK Group and infrastructure company GVK among its regular clients. While companies and their global clients visiting India form the main set of customers, there are others for whom such trips are fancy rides.Sukhiwinder Arora, who looks after the company’s operations, said that a few months ago, they flew a family of 27 members for a wedding from Macau to Hanoi on a 37-seater plane.