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It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Super-Mogul!

White Plains

Eugene V. Lyandres began a recent workweek inspecting construction equipment in Manhattan and Elizabeth, N. J., part of his job as the president of Techworld Solutions, a Stamford company that provides cranes locally and around the globe.

But unlike most Monday commuters, Mr. Lyandres conducted his business from an unusual vantage point. Forgoing traffic that had the potential to fray nerves and take up most of his day, he hopped aboard a helicopter based at Westchester County Airport here and circled the inspection sites from 1,000 feet in the air.

The helicopter is owned by Keith Vitolo, 33, a former banker who lives in Mamaroneck. Years of working in aircraft financing, coupled with his own travel mishaps — an airline computer glitch that forced him to spend hours in Detroit despite perfect flying conditions is a particular sore point — convinced Mr. Vitolo that there were people who would prize speed over cost, ease over congestion.

“People are fed up with airlines,” he said, adding, “They don’t want to sit in traffic. It’s one of the most stressful experiences you can have.”

Last month, Mr. Vitolo began operating AwesomeFlight.com, a one-helicopter charter service, from the Westchester County Airport. He joined a handful of companies that operate helicopter service there, catering to a niche population that has both the inclination and wherewithal to forgo traditional means of transportation.

That niche may be impervious to a bumpy economy, based as it is on a clientele willing to pay anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars for a trip that in most cases takes under an hour. A one-way trip from White Plains to Manhattan on Mr. Vitolo’s helicopter, a Robinson R-44 Raven II, for example, takes 30 minutes and costs between $500 and $750, depending on the day of the week.

At the opposite end of that scale is a commute on Associated Aircraft Group’s Sikorsky S-76, powered by a twin turbine engine. The S-76 is a variation of the craft used in the military for rescue operations and to transport the president, said Carolyn Marino, Associated’s director of sales and marketing. The company, owned by Sikorsky, flies in and out of Westchester Airport frequently. A one-way trip from White Plains to Manhattan on one of these aircraft costs about $4,200, for up to six or seven passengers, Ms. Marino said.

Ms. Marino declined to identify the clientele willing to pay up to 700 times the cost of a one-way train ticket from White Plains to Manhattan if there is only one passenger aboard. But she did describe them as an elite group of executives culled from the upper echelons of American business — for whom confidentiality is as valued as efficiency. “We fly some of the biggest names in the corporate world,” she said.

On a sun-drenched Monday, two Associated pilots, Yuval Hadaya and John Manghini, brought their helicopter down for a landing directly beside Mr. Vitolo’s helicopter at Westchester Airport, dwarfing the bubble-shaped Raven, which was being prepared for Mr.Lyandres’s inspection tour, temporarily drowning out conversation.

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FLYING HIGH Eugene V. Lyandres, in foreground, aboard a chartered helicopter flown by Keith Vitolo at the Westchester County Airport.Credit...Susan Farley for The New York Times

Westchester has one of the area’s strictest noise abatement programs in the metropolitan area and a voluntary no-fly period between midnight and 6:30 a.m., said Harry Stanton, the county’s deputy commissioner of transportation.

Mr. Stanton said that a small number of the noise complaints the county receives involve helicopters: of the 206 it received in May, 20 were related to helicopters, he said.

Mr. Hadaya and Mr. Manghini were returning from a trip to Southampton, a frequent destination for them.

While Mr. Vitolo does not expect a drop in his business as the economy weakens, some in the aviation field indicated a softening in the charter business as a result of the downturn in the economy.

John Boyd, the general manager of Panorama Flight Service, which provides fuel, maintenance and other aviation services to chartered aircraft, including helicopters, at Westchester Airport, sees a dip. He said that in the past three to four months, there has been about a 10 percent decrease in Panorama’s business at the airport, which includes helicopters and jet planes.

Javier Diaz, the owner of Wings Air, which has been operating chartered helicopter and jet service out of Westchester for six years, said that recent shifts on Wall Street have cut his helicopter flights in half, to two or three a day.

But Mr. Diaz was quick to point out distinctions in the market between titans and the merely super-rich. “There are two segments to this business,” he said, pointing out the difference between those affected by diminished bonuses or layoffs and an entirely separate clientele that remains immune to any shifts. “You will always have demand from the high-end clientele,” he said.

Signs of that portion of the clientele were on display on a recent Saturday morning at Panorama, where their BMWs and high-end sports cars sat in the parking lot near the hangar that houses Mr. Vitolo’s helicopter, as well as a collection of chartered jets, including a 10-passenger Challenger 600 that makes regular trans-Atlantic trips. “Aviation continues to be vibrant in this area,” Mr. Boyd said.

Mr. Vitolo said he had spent many months honing his business plan and calculating the costs involved in running a charter business that used what he called a state-of-the-art flying machine, with safety features like G.P.S. navigation and collision-avoidance systems that were unavailable on smaller aircraft a few years ago. Insurance is more than $16,000 a year; maintenance — required every 100 hours of flight by the Federal Aviation Administration — costs up to $3,000 each time.

Rising fuel costs are an additional consideration. Mr. Boyd at Panorama said that jet fuel now costs $6 to $7 a gallon, up $2 or more in the last year.

Still, Mr. Vitolo echoed a sentiment expressed by others in the aviation field — that demand for his kind of service is a luxury sought out by a select demographic group in areas like Westchester, particularly once they have experienced private flight. “Once you fly like this, you’re spoiled,” Mr. Vitolo said. “You just never want to go back to commercial flights.”

A correction was made on 
Jan. 4, 2009

An article on July 13 about a small helicopter chartering service at the Westchester County airport for business executives and other people short on time, and a picture caption with the article, misspelled the name of one of the customers last summer. He was Eugene V. Lyandres, not Landres. Mr. Lyandres only recently brought the misspelling to the editors’ attention.

A correction was made on 
Feb. 15, 2009

An article on July 13 about helicopter charters at the Westchester County Airport for business executives and other people short on time misspelled the surname of the owner of Wings Air, one of the charter service operators. He is Javier Diaz, not Diez. (Mr. Diaz pointed out the error in an e-mail message on Feb. 3.)

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