JRD Tata, who zealously believed in the value of time, once forgot his alarm clock but mosquitoes made his job easy to keep the doyen of Indian Civil Aviation's pioneering flight on course on this day 68 years back.
"I forgot to bring an alarm clock to wake me up to continue the flight to Madras (now Chennai) but the mosquitoes made the job easy," Tata, a stickler for punctuality, had said.
October 15 is considered the birth anniversary of the country's Civil Aviation sector since it was on this day in 1932 when 28-year-old Tata had flown his aircraft from Karachi to Madras as a connecting flight service to London-Karachi segment operated by erstwhile Imperial Airways via Basra and Cairo.
The Tata flight marked the commencement of commercial internal air transport in the Indian subcontinent.
The House of Tatas or Tata Sons Limited began Karachi- Ahmedabad-Bombay-Bellary-Madras mail services on October 15, 1932 carrying mail bags which had left London a week before.
The service was operated by deHavilland Puss moth VT-AND aircraft flown by Tata from Karachi to Bombay and piloted by Neville Vincent from Bombay to Madras. The service arrived at Madras on October 17 after a stop over at Bellary the previous night.
The young Tata had to persuade his parents and uncles to invest Rs one lakh on air services from corporate funds.
On another occasion, Tata while alighting from a flight at Croydon Airport (the erstwhile name of Heathrow Airport of London) quipped, "Boys set your watch right. It is 08-00 AM now".
That was on June 8, 1948 when the company turned out to be an international airliner by operating a flight from Bombay to London via Cairo and Geneva. This was the beginning of Air India International, a future carrier of the Indian tricolour.
Appropriately, the services of the Tata Sons Limited were pioneered by the young Tata who was the first Indian to get a pilot license.
Till 1935 February 25, Tata Sons had to include Bellary an obscure town, on account of the demand by the then Nizam of Hyderabad who demanded a heavy amount from the company to allow the aircraft to land at Hyderabad.
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