Tata Sons Tata Airlines
JRD Tata's commitment to quality aviation, born on a beach in France and passed on to Tata Sons, makes the group’s re-entry with Singapore Airlines no surprise.
JRD Tata's commitment to quality aviation, born on a beach in France and passed on to Tata Sons, makes the group’s re-entry with Singapore Airlines no surprise.
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Hardelot is a beach town in the north of France. It is in the Pas de Calais, a region along the English Channel where the distance to Britain is short and, unlikely as it may seem, this is why it has a link to the development of commercial aviation in India.
Closeness to Britain was why, at the start of the 20th century, a group of investors decided to develop Hardelot as a holiday town for rich British families. One who took up the offer wasn't British, but Indian and Parsi, the businessman RD Tata, cousin of Jamsetji Tata, who bought a house for his French wife and their children, and also became a property developer there. One of the roads in Hardelot would come to be named Avenue des Indes.
Hardelot is also less than 40 km from Sangatte, which is even closer to Britain and the place Louis Bleriot, the French aviator, set off from in the first successful crossing of the channel by plane. That was in 1909, the same time RD Tata came to Hardelot, and the event made a big impression on his five-year-old son Jehangir. When Bleriot bought a neighbouring villa in Hardelot, Jehangir quickly became friends with his son, Louis junior, and both of them would spend much time with Bleriot's planes.
Jehangir, better known as JRD Tata, would later recall the excitement of seeing a plane landing on Hardelot beach for the first time: "It was flown by Adolphe Pegoud, the first man to loop-the-loop. From then on I was hopelessly hooked on aeroplanes and made up my mind that come what may, one day, I would be a pilot." This would happen when he was back in Bombay and India's first flying club was being formed. Twelve days after the launch of the Aero Club of India & Burma, JRD went on his first solo flight and then, on February he got the first flying licence issued by the club.
JRD's connection with flying went far deeper than just business. It survived not just the problems of the industry, but also more personal losses. In those early years JRD escaped death in a flying accident at least once, but his younger brother Jimmy was not so lucky. He was a strapping young man, who JRD always said was a better pilot than he was himself, and in he set out with an Austrian friend to fly from Austria to the UK. While they were flying over the friend's Austrian home he tried to turn and wave to his family, but with two tall men in a tiny plane, the action imbalanced them and sent the plane into a spin and a crash, killing both of them.
Stories like that make JRD's famous first commercial flight of Tata Aviation, which he flew himself on from Karachi to Bombay, a remarkable example of a businessman putting his own life on the line. JRD's involvement, and the re-enactments he flew in and have come to overshadow the commercial aspect of the flight.
It was meant to demonstrate the viability of airmail from London to the subcontinent right down to Ceylon, and Karachi was the starting point as it had an Imperial Airways (the forerunner of today's British Airways) service from the UK. The 45 pounds of mail JRD carried on his flight was immediately taken on by his business partner, the South African-born Nevil Vintcent, on a further flight, with halts on the way at places like Bellary, to end in Madras, from where it immediately set off on the return journey to Karachi, so that the mail could catch the Imperial Airways flight to the UK.
What is also remarkable is how soon this venture started turning a profit. Aviation is a notorious loss-maker, at least in its early years; yet by Tata Aviation had made a slim profit of Frederick Tymms, the director-general of civil aviation in India at that time is quoted as saying, "Scarcely anywhere else in the world was there an air service operating without support from the government." The government had signed the mail contract by then, but that was pretty much all the support Tata Aviation was getting.
Luckily, another source of support had emerged with the maharajas. We are familiar with Air India's moustachioed maharaja, but in the early days of the airline actual maharajas also played a role. An article in The Times of India in points out that with the Indian government displaying little interest in developing aviation facilities, it had been left to various maharajas to step in: "The aerodrome at Jodhpur is acknowledged to be the best equipped in India and by laying out such an aerodrome and providing facilities for accommodation, etc the Maharaja has made his capital an important stopping place on the route between Karachi and the East." Another example was the private aerodrome of Raja Sir Annamalai Chettiar of Chettinad which was proposed to become the home base of a Madras-Ceylon air service.
By
Ganesh Kushwaha [ DIAM ]
Executive Air Ticketing & Reservations
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