J. R. D. Tata Held India's Pilot Licence No. 1, Flew the First Tata Airmail From Karachi to Bombay on 15 October 1932 and Chaired Air India for 25 Years

On 15 October 1932 J. R. D. Tata took off from Karachi in a second-hand Puss Moth carrying the first mail of what became India’s first airline, and landed that day on the Juhu mud flat outside Bombay. At 28 he had held India’s pilot licence No. 1 for three years and eight months.

The airline grew into Air India, which began flying from Bombay to London on 8 June 1948. Its chairman for 25 years, Tata received the Bharat Ratna in 1992.

Licence No. 1, issued on 10 February 1929

Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata was born in Paris in 1904, the second of four children of R. D. Tata and his French wife, Sooni, according to the Tata Group’s heritage pages. Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine reports that he moved to Bombay in 1925 and took an unpaid apprenticeship with the Tata group.

When a flying club opened in Bombay he learned to fly. The Aero Club of India and Burma delivered his certificate on 10 February 1929, and Air & Space says he qualified after three hours and 45 minutes in the air. India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation lists him as the first Indian to hold a pilot’s licence, number 1. Years later he told his biographer R. M. Lala: “The fact that it bore the Number 1 added to my pride in owning it.”

A year later he entered the Aga Khan’s prize of 500 pounds for the first Indian to fly solo between England and India. Air & Space says he flew a Gipsy Moth from Karachi to Croydon, and that 18-year-old Aspy Engineer, later chief of staff of the Indian Air Force, won the race.

Six weeks later, a proposal for an airmail route

In March 1929, six weeks after the licence, Tata Sons submitted its first airmail proposal to the colonial government. Nevill Vintcent, a South African former Royal Air Force pilot who had been flying over the subcontinent as a surveyor and barnstormer, was the partner and chief pilot. It was a weekly service from Karachi, where Imperial Airways delivered mail from England, to Bombay and Madras. Bombay would be about eight hours away against nearly 45 by rail, with two aircraft and a government outlay of Rs 100,000 to 125,000, but the government pleaded poverty.

Air & Space dates the contract to 24 April 1932. The contract ran for ten years, required the company to employ British subjects and use British aircraft, and paid only a small amount per pound of mail carried. According to Tata’s own history, the company asked for a small subsidy, was refused, and decided to run on the stamp surcharge that senders paid to connect with Imperial Airways at Karachi. Initial investment was Rs 200,000 (Rs 2 lakh), and the Tata Sons chairman, Sir Dorab Tata, was “not a bit enthusiastic” at first, that history says.

Asked later why they went ahead on those terms, Tata said he and Vintcent “had faith in the future of aviation”.

The flight of 15 October 1932

Inauguration was set for 15 September, but monsoon rain left Juhu, then a dried mud flat on the coast north of Bombay, too soft to land on. A month passed before it dried. Finally, on 15 October, Tata boarded the Puss Moth at Drigh Road airport in Karachi with goggles and a slide rule for navigation.

Accounts of the load differ. Air & Space says he carried 120 pounds (about 54 kg) of mail. Live History India and The Better India give 25 kg of letters stamped at 4 annas. At Ahmedabad, about halfway through the 600-mile route, fuel arrived in two-gallon tins on a bullock cart. Tata’s recollection, quoted by Air & Space, has him away again after 20 minutes, “after a lemonade and a brief talk to the press”.

His own account has the Puss Moth humming along at a “dazzling” hundred miles an hour. There were “no radio, no navigational or landing guides of any kind”, he recalled, and no aerodrome in Bombay.

Mail for Madras went on in a second Puss Moth flown by Vintcent, who spent the night at Bellary. Madras Musings gives the arrival in Madras as 17 October 1932.

A year of 100 per cent punctuality

India’s Directorate of Civil Aviation, in its report for 1933 to 1934, praised the service for completing a year, to 10 October 1933, with 100 per cent punctuality, including through the monsoon. Air & Space reports that in its first full year the airline flew 160,000 miles with 23,800 pounds of mail and freight and 155 passengers.

Monsoons still closed Juhu, so each year the company moved two planes, three pilots and three mechanics to a maidan at Poona (Pune), by Tata’s account. Revenues rose after 1936, when the British Empire Mail Service began carrying first-class mail by air without a surcharge. Larger aircraft, a pilot training centre and a Bombay to Delhi service in 1937 followed. The Government of India then requisitioned the airline’s services for the Second World War, and Vintcent died when an RAF Hudson he was travelling on was reported shot down off the coast of France, Tata’s history says.

From Tata Air Lines to Air India International

In 1946 Tata Air Lines, until then a division of Tata Sons, became a joint stock company called Air-India. The Tatas proposed a service to Europe in October 1947, in the turmoil after Partition, and ordered three Lockheed Constellations before the government had agreed. Their plan gave the government 49 per cent, the Tatas 25 per cent and the public the rest, with an option for the government to buy 2 per cent more. Approval came within weeks, Tata says.

On 8 June 1948 Air-India International began its Europe service. Its first aircraft, a Lockheed Constellation named Malabar Princess, flew from Bombay to London by way of Cairo and Geneva with 35 passengers. Tata was aboard, carrying goodwill messages from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to the leaders of Britain, Egypt and Switzerland, Airways Magazine reports. A Times of India advertisement of 3 June 1948 priced the ticket at Rs 1,720.

Twenty-five years in the chairman’s seat

In 1953 the government decided to merge the private airlines into a state corporation. Tata’s advice, which was accepted, was for two corporations, one domestic and one international. Under the Air Corporations Act, in force from 28 May 1953, Indian Airlines and Air India International were created, and Tata became chairman of Air-India and a director of Indian Airlines. Khaleej Times reports that he was unpaid.

Air-India’s first jet, a Boeing 707, arrived in February 1960, according to the Air India Collector timetable archive. R. E. G. Davies, a former air transport curator at the National Air and Space Museum, said in Air & Space that “the Air-India fleet was always modern and competitive”. The 1979 Tony Jannus Award for scheduled commercial flying went to Tata, the first Asian recipient, the Tata Central Archives record. A 46-year aviation career, in Tata’s company history, ran from the two-seat Puss Moth to the Boeing 747.

Tata had opposed nationalisation. A 1953 telegram to Nehru said the “nationalisation scheme is not sound and will not result in the creation of an efficient and self supporting air transport system”. Nehru, in a letter, noted his “evident distress”. The chairmanship ended in early 1978. Khaleej Times says the government of Morarji Desai removed him on 1 February 1978; the Tata Group’s own pages give 1978 in one place and 1977 in another.

Honours, and a flight at 78

Padma Vibhushan came first: the Gazette of India of 26 January 1955 lists him among the awardees. Chairmanship of Tata Sons had come in 1938, at the age of 34, and he stepped down in 1991, handing over to Ratan N. Tata.

The Bharat Ratna followed in 1992. Home Ministry records show three awards that year, to Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (posthumously), Tata and Satyajit Ray. President R. Venkataraman conferred it at Rashtrapati Bhavan in March 1992, the Tata Central Archives record. His reaction, as the Tata Group’s profile quotes it, was “Why me? I don’t deserve it.” The United Nations Population Award reached him in New York on 17 September 1992. The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, whose founding is told in the story of Homi Bhabha and the atomic programme, also had his support. He died in Geneva on 29 November 1993.

Fifty years to the day after the first flight, on 15 October 1982, Tata flew a Leopard Moth from Karachi to Bombay at the age of 78, because no suitable Puss Moth could be found. A crowd of about 1,500 guests waited at Juhu, where he landed. Asked why he did it, he said he hoped the flight would “rekindle a spark of enthusiasm” in young people. A commemorative stamp for the golden jubilee of civil aviation in India was issued in 1982.

Afterwards

The Tata Central Archives hold a photograph of the 1932 inaugural flight that astronaut Kalpana Chawla, an admirer of Tata, carried on her first space mission. For today’s airports, see the piece on India’s airport boom.

Tata Sons was named the winning bidder on 8 October 2021. Handover came on 27 January 2022, when the government gave Air India to Talace Private Limited, a subsidiary of the Tata Group’s holding company, at the airline’s headquarters in New Delhi. The price was Rs 18,000 crore, made up of Rs 2,700 crore in cash and Rs 15,300 crore of debt taken over by the buyer. N. Chandrasekaran, the chairman of Tata Sons, wrote to employees: “We are proud to welcome Air India back into the Tata family, after all these years.”