In a manner of speaking, Air India, India's foundering national airline, turns eighty on Monday â€" an octogenarian that started life with a spry hop from Karachi to Bombay. It should be a proud moment, except that it serves only to remind us of the irony that one of India's most dilapidated public-sector companies was launched by â€" and then wrested away from â€" one of India's most successful private corporations.
For Jehangir Tata, whose father's cousin had founded the Tata group in 1868, an obsession with flying began early. Much of young Jeh's boyhood was spent in the French town of Hardelot, where his family's beach house stood near another owned by Louis Blériot, the first man to cross the English Channel in an airplane. After Charles Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic in 1927, Mr. Tata sketched an ink drawing of Mr. Lindbergh's plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, in his scrapbook. Just 12 days after a Flying Club opened in Bombay in early 1929, his biographer, R.M. Lala, recounts in “Beyond the Last Blue Mountain,†Mr. Tata had logged enough hours to fly solo; a further week later, he had his blue-and-gold pilot's license, issued by the Aero Club of India & Burma and serial-numbered 1. “No document has ever given me a greater thrill,†Mr. Tata would tell Mr. Lala many decades later. The photograph in the license shows a lissome Jehangir Tata, not yet 25, his hair slicked back with pomade, a toothbrush moustache perched perfectly below his nose, and his clear-eyed confidence spilling out of the frame.
Until November 1929, Mr. Tata contented himself with harum-scarum joyrides in India and Europe; in that month, howeve r, he spotted the Aga Khan's announcement of a 500-pound prize for the first Indian to fly solo between England and India. This was serious flying, and Mr. Tata could not help but be interested. (It is almost too delicious that one of Mr. Tata's rivals for the Aga Khan's prize was a pilot named Manmohan Singh, who, having taken off from Croydon, first lost his bearings over the English Channel and then, on a second attempt, found himself flummoxed by fog over Europe. A magazine named Aeroplane remarked: “Mr. Manmohan Singh called his aeroplane ‘Miss India' and he is likely to!â€) From Karachi, Mr. Tata flew via Basra, Cairo and Naples, but by the time he reached Paris, another pilot, Aspy Engineer, had flown the same route in reverse and already landed in Karachi.
As far as aviation was concerned, therefore, Mr. Tata was already dry tinder. The spark came from Nevill Vintcent, a former prizefighter from South Africa and a Royal Air Force pilot who was barnstorming his way across India in the late 1920s. When he expressed, into the right ears, his desire to start a commercial air mail service, Mr. Vintcent was introduced to Mr. Tata. During a series of conversations with Mr. Lala, collected in a book called “The Joy of Achievement,†Mr. Tata said about Mr. Vintcent:
He was remarkable. A very fine man … He knew, the man that he was, that the Imperial Airways Airline was coming to India, to Karachi, as a first step towards Australia … but they would also go across to Delhi and Calcutta. The whole of south India would be blank and unserviced, and that's how he worked out a proposal to have a flight from Karachi to Ahmedabad to Bombay to Madras.
In Air & Space magazine, the journalist David Shaftel described how, writing to Mr. Tata in 1931, Mr. Vintcent presaged the debate over the liberalization of Indian aviation by several decades: “If the route is state operated I maintain that it will e ffectively put a stop to any further efforts by private firms to develop other routes, as they will argue that after the spade work has been done, the state reaps the benefit,†Mr. Vintcent wrote. “I also maintain that private enterprise will develop flying far more quickly than the state can hope to do, and will consequently provide more openings for Indians in this profession.â€
Finally, in April 1932, a new company called Tata Aviation Services struck a 10-year contract with the government to haul mail from Karachi, where it arrived from London on Imperial Airways, to Bombay and thence to Madras. The negotiations had so frustrated Mr. Tata that he offered, in desperation, to charge the government nothing at all for the service and only a nominal rate per pound of mail carried. He was confident, as The Straits Times in Singapore reported in July 1932, that “although to start with the service will be a losing concern, within a short period the commercial commun ity … will appreciate the service and begin to use it, and thus enable the company to make it a paying proposition.†The Straits Times pointed out two disadvantages “with which the new service will start, namely, there will be no wireless equipment in the machines, as it is very costly and the promoters of the scheme cannot afford it, and there will be no night flying, as night flying ground facilities are not yet available in India.â€
Poor mid-September weather forced Mr. Tata to push his inaugural flight to Oct. 15, when he took off, with more than 100 pounds of mail, in a single-engine De Havilland Puss Moth, from the Drigh Road aerodrome in Karachi. (Mr. Vintcent would fly the second leg, from Bombay via Bellary to Madras.) By train, the Karachi-Bombay route needed 45 hours to complete; Mr. Tata touched down on the mud flats of Juhu in less than eight hours, having stopped off in Ahmedabad to refuel his plane from four-gallon Burmah-Shell petrol cans transpo rted to the runway on a bullock cart. The postmaster of Bombay himself ceremonially collected the mail from Mr. Tata in Juhu; indeed, such an acute sense of occasion marked the entire enterprise that the envelopes â€" like the one addressed to “A. Achutten, Esqr., General Merchant, Bramagiri, Udipi†â€" were franked “Karachi-Madras, First Airmail.â€
A photograph taken after the landing in Bombay shows Mr. Tata standing with his colleagues, left arm akimbo, his white trousers still so uncreased and his hair so immaculately in place that he looks for all the world like a county cricketer just about to have a leisurely bat before lunch. In reality, Mr. Lala reveals in “Beyond the Last Blue Mountain,†the flight had been hot and bumpy, and Mr. Tata battled headwinds throughout. Part of the way through, an unfortunate bird flew into Mr. Tata's cabin, forcing him to kill it before it endangered his flying. But in a conversation with Mr. Lala years later, Mr. Tata remembered that first flight as “delightful … We were a small team in those days. We shared successes and failures, the joys and heartaches, as together we built up the enterprise which later was to blossom into Air-India and Air-India International.â€
This is the first of a two-part series. Next: How J.R.D. Tata lost his airline to the new government of independent India.
