When Air India Was Efficient, Profitable and Growing Fast

Courtesy of Björn LarssonA Tata Airlines route map from 1939.

Having convinced the government, in 1932, that he should run an air mail service for it, 28-year-old J. R. D. Tata did not need much longer to demonstrate that he was doing a stand-up job. Tata Air Mail's scrupulous adherence to schedules was legendary. Only a year into its operations, the Directorate of Civil Aviation wrote in a report:

“As an example of how air mail service should be run, we commend the efficiency of Tata Services who on October 10, 1933, arriving at Karachi as usual to time, completed a year's working with 100 per cent punctuality… Our esteemed Trans-Continental Airways, alias Imperial Airways [the British carrier], might send their staff on deputation to Tatas to see how it is done.”

Tata Air Mail made a profit of 60,000 rupees its first year. By 1937, that profit had risen to 600,000 rupees. Auxiliary routes were developed, but its main one continued to retrace the 1932 trial run by Mr. Tata and Nevill Vintcent, skipping from Karachi through Ahmedabad and Bombay to Madras. A handsomely illustrated 1935 timetable (mentioning, as an aside, that “Tata Air Mail ‘Planes are lubricated with Mobiloil”) reveals that a letter from Karachi to Madras would leave on Monday between 6 and 6:30 a.m., pass through Ahmedabad four hours later and Bombay around lunchtime, spend the night in Hyderabad, and arrive at the Madras airport at 9:55 a.m. on Tuesday.

Courtesy of Björn LarssonA Tata Airlines poster from 1939.

In 1938, just after Mr. Tata changed the name of his company to Tata Airlines, he began to run regularly into the a fickle and obstinate government, a process of attrition that wearied and exasperated him for the next 15 years. During World War II, the government commandeered all his aircraft. When he offered to manufacture the De Havilland Mosquito in India, he was first encouraged and then instructed to make gliders instead. Not long thereafter, the government cancelled the contract because, ironically, it didn't have airplanes to tow the gliders â€" the very airplanes that Mr. Tata had offered to make in the first place.

Mr. Vintcent, Mr. Tata's chief collaborator, died in 1942, when a military airplane he was traveling in was shot down off the co ast of France. Nevertheless, Mr. Tata continued to prepare, as he later told his biographer R. M. Lala, “tentative post-war plans of development of our own, which included…the operation of external services westwards and, if possible, all the way to England.”

Soon after the war ended, Mr. Tata set about putting these plans into motion, renaming his company Air India, taking it public and hiring a former TWA stewardess to train his new flight attendants. In 1948, shortly before Air India launched its Bombay-London route, Mr. Tata agreed to allow the new Indian government to own 49 percent of the airline, with the option to buy another 2 percent whenever it desired. The arrangement was, in retrospect, an odd one, for in giving the government the chance to become the majority shareholder, it opened the door to the nationalization of the airline. And yet Mr. Tata had, in 1946, told the Associated Press of India: “In the present instance…there is an overwhelming c ase against the nationalisation of Indian airlines.”

Courtesy of Björn LarssonAn Air India poster from Aug. 2, 1949.

Almost inevitably, in 1953, the government paid 28 million rupees to secure a majority stake in Air India's stock; For another 30 million rupees, it also purchased eight other domestic airlines. Mr. Tata was disconsolate. In his biography of Mr. Tata, “Beyond the Last Blue Mountain,” Mr. Lala quotes him as telling colleagues: “I was so indignant at the manner in which the Government had treated the air transport industry…and had deliberately brought it to its knees, in order to acquire it for a song.” The previous year, he had already co mplained to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru that members of his cabinet were “resorting to incorrect and unfair statements…that the airlines in general, and Air India in particular, are dishonest and greedy, cannot be trusted, and fully deserve their present plight.” Mr. Nehru replied that his government had been “driven to the conclusion that there was no other way out except to organise [the airlines] together under the State.”

In a long, stinging telegram back to Mr. Nehru, Mr. Tata minced no words:

I CAN ONLY DEPLORE THAT SO VITAL A STEP SHOULD HAVE BEEN TAKEN WITHOUT GIVING US A PROPER HEARING

The pain of having his airline snatched away in this manner never entirely dissipated. In a letter to a colleague, Mr. Tata wrote:

“Even more than the decision itself, I was upset by the manner in which nationalisation was introduced through the back door without any prior consultation of any kind with the in dustry… However, we have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we are living in a political and bureaucratic age in which people like ourselves no longer count for much in the scheme of things.”

A more admirable coda followed. Having taken possession of his airline, the government concluded that the best person to guide Air India was Mr. Tata himself, and it invited him back to be its chairman. This presented a quandary, and Mr. Tata canvassed the opinions of his top managers before he made his decision and took the job. “I came to the conclusion,” Morgan Witzel quotes Mr. Tata as saying in his book “Tata: The Evolution of a Corporate Brand,” “that I should not shirk the opportunity of discharging a duty to the country and to Indian aviation. I am particularly anxious that the present high standards of Air India International should not be adversely affected by nationalization.”

In a final message to the Air India staff that summer of 1953, before he lost ownership of his airline, Mr. Tata wrote:

“So as this last day of July marks the passing of an enterprise born twenty-one years ago, my thoughts turn to happier days gone by and in particular to an exciting October dawn, when a Puss Moth and I soared joyfully from Karachi.”

This is the second of a two-part series, in honor of Air India's 80th birthday, which is October 15. Read part one about the airline's birth here.