Search for liquid gold: It is the helicopter that connects Bombay High's giant oil rigs with operations on the mainland. "We regularly transport engineers, crew and machinery to these rigs," says a spokesman for Pawan Hans, the largest chopper service in India with a fleet of 36. "Ships and small boats are no match for the quick-reaction time needed for these offshore operations." Though choppers seem to be doing no more than the usual function of an aircraft - transporting people or cargo - they still are key to the operating of an oil rig. They make 25-30 landings a day on ONGC rigs, supervising 11,000 km of oil and gas pipelines.
Fighting Fires: The worst Australian bush fires in history just weeks ago, were finally put out by choppers. They behaved like an airborne fire service, squirting large amounts of water on the raging blaze. Could this ever happen in India? Not likely, says Delhi's chief fire officer, R C Sharma, "India doesn't have such a precarious situation as we don't have such huge dry forests. Most are interspersed by habitation or are somewhat barren. The use of choppers in fire-fighting would be a luxury in a country where even basic fire-fighting equipment is not available everywhere." Some choppers are also used as ambulances.
Mapping the planet: Aircraft can lay bare the mysteries that lie beneath the planet's surface. "Whenever there are stresses inside the earth," says Professor Arun Awasthi of IIT Roorkee's earth sciences department, "there are temperature variations in the semi-solid rocks and liquids there. This leads to fault lines on the surface, which can be caught in aerial photographs. Energy is later released through these fault lines as quakes." New mineral deposits and oil and natural gas reserves can also be gauged by high-resolution aero-magnetic surveys, which show faults and differentiate between rock types. "These special aircraft use instruments such as the garvimeter (which measures the gravitational field and detects oil under the surface) and magnetometer (which checks differences in magnetic field)," says Awasthi.
Agricultural aviation: Till 1988, it was mainly Indian Air Force pilots on deputation who used to perform the highly-specialized job of spraying pesticides on crops. After that, civilian operators took over but this practice died a natural death due to lack of government support. But it can and should be revived again, say experts. David Martin, former director of the now-defunct directorate of agricultural aviation, says, "If plants are not sprayed at the right time, the output could go down by 40%." In the US and Europe, small planes, kitted with spraying systems, are extensively used. In New Zealand and Australia, where farms are large, bigger planes are used.
In India, fixed-wing planes such as the Bell G3 and Hiller were some of those used to spray crops and plantations - rubber, cotton, mustard or rice. Martin says, "Manual spraying in plantations was difficult and hence, aerial spraying was done two feet above the canopy of trees," he says. In 2005, the US had plans to use planes to fumigate opium crops in Afghanistan. But Afghan President Hamid Karzai opposed the proposal, putting paid to it. Even so, US planes have been used before in concerted programmes to destroy opium and cocoa crops in Colombia.
People-tracker: The Amazon is reportedly home to 39 isolated tribes. The Brazilian authorities are equipping planes, normally used to monitor deforestation, with body-heat sensors in an attempt to locate and map these unknown tribes. The planes criss-cross the Amazon at high altitudes. London-headquartered-NGO Survival International, which helps to protect indigenous people, says the planes will mean a tribe can be located without the risk of exposing it to 'foreign' diseases, such as flu that occur through contact.
Say it with flowers: Helicopters are commonly used to drop flowers over massed crowds or very special people, be it over B R Ambedkar's statue during his birthday celebrations in Dadar or newly-weds in the NCR region. At Rs 60,000 an hour, it is an expensive flight.
Fishing for trouble: Aircraft are also used for illegal activities such as Bluefin tuna fishing. In the Mediterranean, spotter planes aid the illegal fishing of this endangered species.