Powell, who was a pilot in the Maldives last year when he was hired by the four-plane Sri Lankan start-up, says that the 440-kilometer, or 275-mile, long island off India’s southern coast is the perfect spot for the kind of short flights that seaplanes can provide.
“This is the fun part. Nobody does this anymore,” Powell said before asking one of the central questions of the seaplane experience: “Do you want to go inland — over the mountains — at about 5,000 feet, or follow the coast at 500?”
Five hundred feet it was, and the small Cessna 208 Caravan taxied along the runway at Bandaranaike International Airport near Colombo, dwarfed by the Emirates A330-200 in the slot ahead.
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.”
However, he added: “This isn’t the Maldives where you need seaplanes scheduled all day to ferry people to the villas. Remember that air travel is still a luxury here.”
Back on the runway, the 38-foot turboprop took just a few seconds to get airborne, rising quickly over Colombo’s low skyline, dotted with cranes.
On board, there is no partition between the pilot and the plush passenger cabin, whose eight seats are covered in beige leather and maple-walnut trim. Part of the entertainment comes from watching how the plane is flown, and seeing the pilot use pedals to change the flaps or check the dial that indicates the plane’s pitch.
A few miles out, over the Laccadive Sea, the plane hovered over fishing boats and outrigger canoes. Mr. Powell pointed out the half-submerged wreck of the Thermopylae Sierra, a Cypriot-owned vessel that sank in 2012 off Mount Lavinia, a beach town with villas owned by wealthy expatriates.
Flying for a while at 1,500 feet, the melon slice beaches, lagoons, verdant jungle and bright yellow Buddhist stupas come into broad focus. There are the modernist pool-studded homes of the country’s glitterati, and centuries-old Catholic churches in faded blue and pink.
Then the captain turned and winked before pushing the plane down to what felt like a few hundred feet, skipping over the ranks of surfers that waved from the breaks below.
After he pulled back on the controls, the Cessna climbed and banked inland for a few miles, passing over Galle Fort, which was built by the Portuguese in the 16th century and is now part of a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Galle’s narrow cobblestone streets, bell towers and ocher-washed buildings are home to chic shops, cafes and upscale hotels like Tamarind Hill, a 250-year-old former trade and signal house a few miles east of the fort that has been converted into a 12-room boutique hotel. The building’s long terraces and roofs make it easy for monkeys to feast from the mango and banana trees.
At cocktail hour in the bar, visitors like Richard Dobbs, 54, from Britain, can be found enjoying gin martinis or a mix of aged coconut arrack, a local alcohol, with pineapple and lime.
“This is like Thailand in the ’70s,” Mr. Dobbs said. “Lots of friendly locals, who are open and welcoming. God knows how long it will last, but it’s worth seeing while it does.”
Back on board the Cessna, Mr. Powell made for Koggala Lake, an air force base southeast of Galle where Allied forces flew seaplane sorties during World War II. The plane floated over mangrove islets, coconut farms and golden rice paddies gone to seed. The pilot then pushed the nose down hard, leveling it off before the pontoons skidded over the water’s surface.
Mr. Powell, who has flown amphibious aircraft for about nine years, says that seaplanes are among the most romantic ways to fly, but that they do have limitations.
“It’s beautiful here on amazing days like this, but during monsoons it can be a nightmare,” he said, noting that landing at the inland city of Kandy can be particularly difficult at that time of year. “You have 3,800 feet of water to land and take off on — trees on one side, a dam on the other, and who knows what’s in the water. It takes a certain feel to fly this way.”
Even though the island’s northern and eastern coasts were once hubs for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, these areas are now drawing a great deal of attention from hotel developers. Even the country’s military, which has played an active role in trying to jump-start the economies of the former war-torn regions, is opening businesses like resorts and travel agencies.
Local residents still quietly complain about harassment in what remains a heavily militarized zone, and several psychological trauma centers line the streets, even as farmers and schoolchildren along these same routes can be seen waving to foreign tourists.
“People were traumatized so it’s going to take time,” said Trevor Burton, chief executive of Anilana Hotels & Properties, which is building luxury hotels in the area. “This place was a war zone a few years ago.”
The executive, who is from the English county of Derbyshire, said his company was bullish about the east coast, noting that Passikudah Beach was renowned in the ’70s but that the seven-hour drive from Colombo is “brutal.” Taking a helicopter service is better, he said. “Nowhere has wildlife like Sri Lanka,” he added. “You can see herds of wild elephants sometimes on the way over.” (New York Times)
