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Aakash Anand, who was on his way to Kennedy International Airport, looked out the window at the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. “I’m not sitting in that bumper-to-bumper traffic,” he said happily.

He was right. He was 3,000 feet above the traffic, in a helicopter.

In New York City, which is saddled with gridlocked roads and slow and unreliable public transit, more and more of those who can afford to are flying over it all.

Helicopter service is blossoming in the region, not just to the area’s three main airports, but also to the Hamptons, a popular playground for the rich. The Hamptons, on the East End of Long Island, have the same downside as the airports: Getting there by car or commuter train can be no fun at all.

Of course, helicopter travel is fun if you have the money to pay for it, which would leave most New Yorkers sharing the pain on the ground while the privileged fly overhead — yet another manifestation of the income inequality that has come to define life in a new Gilded Age.