Sri Lanka’s growing tourism industry is beginning to require such wide-body jets, although the island is still recovering from more than 25 years of civil war between its Sinhalese majority and Tamil separatists. It also had to contend with the tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004, which claimed an estimated 35,000 people in the country, many of whom had fled the war-ravaged northern and eastern provinces.

In 2013, almost four years after the end of that war, 1.27 million foreign tourists visited the country, the Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority has said. Indian travelers, who numbered 209,000, represented the largest group last year, but there are also increasing numbers of West Europeans and Chinese.

Once foreign visitors have arrived in the country, getting around is far from easy.

The island of 21.7 million residents has a few expressways, mostly financed by Chinese state-owned banks in exchange for infrastructure and resource extraction deals. But for the most part travel involves one-lane roads, often in poor repair and sometimes downright dangerous.

That is where Cinnamon Air and a few other fixed-wing, helicopter and seaplane operators come in. Cinnamon, which began flying last May and describes itself as an air taxi service, offers service from Colombo to the colonial city of Kandy; the temperate hill station of Nuwara Eliya; the beach towns of the south; and a battle-scarred Jaffna, in the north.

“Demand is strong,” said Ieshan Munaweera of Millennium Airlines, a charter service based in Colombo that operates helicopters, planes and seaplanes. “We have a number of new entries into the market and everybody thinks there’s enough pie to go around.”