Catching a Ride to Sochi the Air Taxi Way.

(From The Moscow Times)

SOCHI, Krasnodar Region For many in Russia, catching a taxi involves haggling over 50 rubles with the driver of a beat-up Zhiguli but Yevgeny Andrachnikov's company is aiming much higher than that.

On one such recent trip, Andrachnikov, manager of Dexter taxi services, leaned forward in one of the cab's leather seats to stare out the window, his oversized watch glinting in the sunshine.

The world sped by at 500 kilometers an hour, some 9,000 meters below.

With its small fleet of three bright orange mini-jets, Dexter bills itself as the country's first air taxi service. As the number of millionaires and well-paid executives in the biggest country on the planet soars, the firm is looking to cash in on the boom in private aviation.

Estimates put private aviation passenger growth at about 40 percent last year up to five times higher than the growth for mainstream flights but it still seems like many people have difficulty getting to grips with some of the basic concepts.

"The problem is not that people don't need this service but that they don't really understand what it is," Andrachnikov said during a recent 3 1/2 hour flight from Moscow to Sochi laid on for a small group of reporters in one of the company's new Swiss-made Pilatus jets.