Gov. Paul LePage of Maine happened to be waiting for his flight at Augusta State Airport last Saturday when the weekend crush began.

A turboprop Pilatus PC-12 carrying Melissa Thomas, her daughter, her daughter’s friend and a pile of lacrosse equipment took off for their home in Connecticut, following the girls’ three-week stay at Camp All-Star in nearby Kents Hills. Shortly after, a Cessna Citation Excel arrived, and a mother, a father and their 13-year-old daughter emerged carrying a pink sleeping bag and two large duffel bags, all headed to Camp Vega in Fayette.

"Love it, love it, love it," LePage said of the private-plane traffic generated by summer camps. "I wish they’d stay a week while they’re here. This is a big business."

For decades, parents who sent their children to summer camp faced the same arduous logistics of traveling long distances to remote towns in Maine, New Hampshire and upstate New York to pick up their children or to attend parents’ visiting day.

Now, even as the economy limps along, more of the nation’s wealthier families are cutting out the car ride and chartering planes to fly to summer camps. One private jet broker, Todd Rome of Blue Star Jets, said his summer-camp business had jumped 30 percent over the last year.

This weekend, a popular choice for visiting day at camps, private planes jammed the runways at small rural airports.

Officials at the airport in Augusta said 51 private planes arrived between Thursday and Saturday; on a normal day, they would expect just a few. The airport was so busy that one of its two public runways was closed so all the incoming planes would have someplace to park, said Dale Kilmer, operations manager for Maine Instrument Flight, which operates the airport.

"We have 50 to 60 jets up here in just that one day," Kilmer said. "It’s a madhouse because they all leave at the same time between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m."

At Sullivan County Airport in Bethel, N.Y., roughly 40 percent of recent flights have carried families heading to summer camp. Officials at Laconia Municipal Airport in Gilford, N.H., and Moultonborough Airport in Moultonborough, N.H., report similar experiences.

At Robert Lafleur Airport in Waterville, which is close to many of the private camps in the Belgrade Lake region of Maine, the assistant manager, Randy Marshall, brought on two extra people to help handle the traffic last weekend.

In Augusta, Kilmer usually creates a temporary lounge on parents’ weekend for the pilots and flight attendants who must wait for their clients to return from their children’s camps, so that they can depart later that afternoon. He has already received catering orders for return flights, which include fruit and sandwich trays for adults and sandwich boxes for younger siblings. One flier already requested a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a fruit cup with a single strawberry, a juice box, a banana and a cookie or brownie.

The popularity of private-plane travel is forcing many high-priced camps, where seven-week sessions can easily cost more than $10,000, to balance the habits of their parents against the ethos of simplicity the camps spend the summer promoting.

Kyle Courtiss, whose family runs Camp Vega in Maine, said that his staff was trained "to be cognizant of stuff like that" and that private planes were "not what this camp is about."

Some camps said they recognized that the parents who flew in private planes were often strong financial supporters of these camps. Arleen Shepherd, director of Camp Skylemar, in Naples, Maine, said that while some of the high-profile parents whose children attend Skylemar might fly privately, their campers were a grounded group and some campers had never flown on a plane.

Private-plane companies and parents say these flights have also become more affordable to a broader base of fliers.

Parents said round-trip commercial flights from the New York area to Portland, Maine, on peak weekends when they are allowed to visit could cost $500 to $600, even when bought well in advance. Rome, the Blue Star Jets president, said families could rent a seven-person turboprop plane starting at $3,800 for a round trip in one day, making the price competitive with some commercial flights.

"You don’t have to be a millionaire to do it," Rome said.

Thomas, at the airport in Augusta, said the convenience of flying privately far outweighed the cost of flying.

"I left my home at 6:45 this morning and I’ll be home by noon; I’m turning this trip around in six hours," she said as she unloaded her daughter’s bags from the back of her rented Crown Victoria sedan. "Otherwise, it’s a couple days’ trip."

© 2011 The New York Times Company