Simply Fly

by Capt G R Gopinath

  The trackers wanted to show us a lion’s kill on our way back so the jeep veered from its prescribed trail. The adventure cost us quite a lot because, in no time, we were stopped by jungle rangers. They turned us back on to the permissible trail, but not before imposing a heavy fine of 500 US dollars. We returned to the base camp, heady with a surfeit of jungle smells, sights, and thrills. Lunch was an exotic experience. Africa permits the ‘raising’ of wild animals for the table and there were different types of exotic meat. As evening wore on, we realized we weren’t through with the jungle yet. We set off on a night safari, and the jungle had more sights and sounds in store for us. We headed for Cape Town the following morning.

  We were in the year 2002. Apartheid had officially ended in 1994. But in Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe had unleashed a wave of persecution against the whites. Many had fled the country. In South Africa, there was no state-sponsored violence but the number of incidents of violence against the white minority was growing. African people now had equal opportunities but no education. Being marginalized for centuries, they did not have the skills and the training to qualify for jobs offered by modern-day industry and were therefore unable to participate in the economic process. Those few that had received education were locked away in prison.

  The post-apartheid government was aware that if the whites were to leave, the economy would collapse. An entire generation of Africans would have to work their way in from the sidelines into the mainstream. Meanwhile, the government would create infrastructure, health and sanitation, and education facilities for them.

  Crime had however definitely increased—muggings and robbery the most rampant forms. Crime flourished at traffic signals, at shopping mall entrances, and at public squares. There had even been carjacking, burglary, and arson. Beulah Bonugli’s own house in Johannesberg was like Alcatraz, cordoned off with electric fencing. It had CCTV, guard dogs, and armed security. Her car, a Jaguar, had a flame-thrower to throw criminals off her scent. In her house, I saw photographs of her receiving awards from presidents and political leaders, and others of her with business people from around the world. She had posed for one with Richard Branson. I was curious to hear Beulah Bonugli’s story.

  It began over forty years ago. Bonugli was twenty at the time. She lived in Rhodesia with her husband, trapped in an abusive marriage. One night she decided she had had enough and would walk out. She took her belongings and her two children and fled to South Africa in a small battered car without telling her husband. Once there, she had no job, she had had no education, and absolutely no means of supporting herself. She took refuge in a church, she and her children living off the dole and eating at a soup kitchen. This continued for two years.

  She was able to find a job as an assistant in a bank. From what she earned, Beulah Bonugli put herself through some formal education. With new skills and greater confidence in herself, she rose to become a secretary. One day, quite by chance, she found a business opportunity. She seized it and toiled day and night to make the business grow. It did, and Beulah Bonugli eventually created a business empire for herself, becoming one of the wealthiest women in South Africa.

  She acquired qualities needed for a successful business entrepreneur, and ones I admired—was shrewd and astute. No lawyer was present at our meetings representing her or me. After dinner, we sat down to hammer out a lease deal for two Pilatus aircraft. I made two alternative proposals. It could be a fixed-lease charge or payment linked to each hour the aircraft flew. I asked for a three-year lease without any upfront deposit or minimum guaranteed monthly lease rentals. In return, I suggested revenue-sharing which suited us both. This arrangement would help me get off the ground without locking up huge capital. It was risky for her, but in return she would receive good compensation when the business took off.

  Beulah agreed to the revenue-sharing arrangement, and before I knew it, the deal was done and she opened a bottle of Champagne. We celebrated.

  We had two aircraft and eighteen empty seats. Why not a vacation with family and friends? We would fly the aircraft from Cape Town via Johannesburg to Nairobi in Kenya and head for Mumbai via Dar-es-Salaam, Djibouti, and Dubai. I calculated that the journey to India, with breaks along the way for local wildlife safaris, would cover about 10,000 km and take us a fortnight.

  I told Beulah Bonugli we would go back, return with our families, and take a vacation ride back in the Pilatus. She offered to host us when we returned. Babu and I flew back to Bengaluru to complete formalities. We prepared a formal agreement for the aircraft lease and convinced the DGCA to let us import the aircraft and permit us to fly it as a commercial charter as was the case elsewhere in the world. We were now all set for the ferry.

  The entourage—Bhargavi, Pallavi, Krithika, and I; Sam, his wife and three children; and Vishnu Rawal, his wife and his son – flew on a South African Airlines flight to Johannesburg.

  We needed two more pilots to fly us back. I hired Sanjay Verma, a pilot who was flying for a local mining company in Orissa. In those days there were hundreds of pilots without jobs and therefore finding one was easy. Rahul Rawal, Vishnu’s son, a qualified pilot, was twenty-one years old and looking for work. I asked Rahul, who was at the time away in the US training additionally as an engineer and freelancing as a flying instructor, to join us.

  Beulah Bonugli lent us two pilots so that we had a pair each per aircraft. She also helped make local arrangements for our families. We visited game parks before embarking on the hopping haul back. We bid Beulah Bonugli a ‘fare thee well’ and took off from Cape Town.

  We set off with a great sense of adventure on a journey that would take us across great landscapes: the hills of Zimbabwe, the great Nyasa and Victoria lakes, the savannahs of Kenya, Mount Kilimanjaro, the plains of Ethiopia, the Red Sea at Djibouti, the Gulf of Aden, a swathe of the southern Arabian Desert across Muscat and Dubai and the Arabian Sea, and coastal Pakistan into the Rann of Kutch and India.

  Thinking of great adventure, I always recall Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh was the last of the truly great aviation explorers of the twentieth century. His is a story of human courage and endurance of unimaginable proportions. He flew the Spirit of St Louis, a single-engine monoplane, solo, in an unpressurized cabin, strapped to the seat with eyes peeled for the entire duration of the flight which lasted thirty-three and a half hours. He took off at 10.20 p.m. from a field in New York and landed on a field at Le Bourget in Paris, 5800 km away across the Atlantic Ocean. He crossed the Atlantic at a time when nobody before had flown that far. Compared with what Lindbergh endured, our adventure was like a picnic to the city suburbia. We had a comfortably pressurized Pilatus cabin to fly us.

  Lindbergh suffered a personal tragedy while in America and moved to Europe. There’s a joke featuring Lindbergh and a lady. Years after the historic trans-atlantic flight, at a gala dinner at the Paris air show, Lindbergh found himself seated next to a society lady. The socialite itched to initiate a conversation, so she turned to Lindbergh and asked him in all innocence, ‘So, Mr Lindbergh, have you ever been to Paris before?’

  After enjoying the wildlife safaris in South Africa, we flew to Kenya. India has close ties with Kenya where a large number of Gujaratis have settled. The Kenyan economy is largely tourism-driven. There are two airports in Nairobi to handle the large number of arrivals. The Jomo Kenyatta International Airport is named after the first president of the country. Then there is the Williams International Airport, the smaller of the two, used almost exclusively for tourists arriving on charters and small aircraft. It is a point to ponder that while Nairobi, with an economy that is perhaps one-fourth that of Bengaluru, has two airports, Bengaluru chose to close one when it opened another!

  We landed at Williams International and were piloted through a maze of aircraft parked cheek by jowl on the tarmac. There were hundreds of aircraft parked there and the pilots had a job carefully manoeuvering the plane in that aircraft parking lot.

  The immigration check was quick and effici
ent. The next day, we flew to the famous Masai Mara Game Reserve. Some of the great Oscar-winning films like Out of Africa and Born Free were shot on location here. We were struck by the beauty of the African grasslands. The landing strip in Masai Mara was like that which we had seen at Kruger: no terminal building, no toilets, just a grass landing strip.

  We landed there, and as our aircraft was being fastened to a stay on the apron, jeeps belonging to resorts in and around the game reserve had lined up. We got into one that would take us to our resort. Just as the jeep pulled out, we saw a fifty-seater DASH 8-200 Bombardier turboprop aeroplane landing on the airstrip. Passengers got off and boarded the other jeeps and left. Those who had arrived in the jeeps boarded the aircraft which took off without delay. There was a cyclical pattern: jeeps arriving, aircraft landing, offloading and loading, jeeps speeding off, and aircraft taking off. Everything was perfectly synchronized and that explained why there were no terminal buildings at the airstrips.

  The safari began at five the following morning. We were eager to spot the big five of the Kenyan reserve. We had just missed the annual wildebeest crossing. The wildebeest or gnu are a kind of large antelope that are local to Africa. Millions of these very agile, large-horned, strong-necked, horse-tailed, sad-faced animals migrate over thousands of kilometres in search of grass pastures.

  We flew the next day over Mount Kilimanjaro and the Horn of Africa to Djibouti, and on to Dubai via Aden, the capital of Yemen. At Dubai airport, close to where we landed, two Mercedes Benz cars were awaiting us. The airport authorities have deployed a fleet of Mercedes Benz cars to welcome charter aircraft passengers and take them to the facilitation centre. The facilitation centre was a mini-palace. Customs and immigration staff waited on arriving passengers, indulged them, and rapidly cleared their passport formalities. The Dubai government is evidently enlightened. It is aware that charter passengers are big spenders, and therefore it has made it easy and attractive for passengers to land, shop, and leave. It has also kept landing and parking charges low; and instituted fast-track immigration procedures. What the government spends on the indulgence showered on passengers, it makes up by the volumes of arrivals and the increased spending by these special passengers.

  We took off from Dubai. As the Pakistan government had not given us permission to overfly or to refuel, we held a straight course for Mumbai, hugging the coastline without violating their airspace. We landed at Mumbai past midnight.

  Mumbai was in stark, shameful contrast to Dubai. As our aircraft landed, we were surrounded by three jeeps. The one in front was the pilot and the two other brought up the rear, as if we were a renegade aircraft. There was neither a separate terminal for charters nor even a parking bay; we were herded to a remote area of the airport. The three jeeps threw a cordon around the aircraft. We were quarantined and we could not access airport facilities. Mumbai even today does not have a separate immigration facility for charters. We got off and were immediately surrounded by customs and airport officials. We had to pay landing, navigation, and parking charges.

  We had informed the authorities that we would be completing immigration formalities in Bengaluru and were therefore not allowed to enter the terminal. We were in a remote and open part of the airfield with no restroom access. The Pilatus aircraft had no toilets. We had chosen ones that did not feature a toilet because we planned to use them for hardcore commercial flying. We had therefore to venture into the mosquito-infested bushes beyond the tarmac: the ladies, the foreign pilots, and the rest of us. This was nothing short of absolute and ridiculous indignity!

  The pilot had to go to the other end of the airport to pay landing charges. The Airports Authority of India (AAI) did not accept credit cards so we had to pay cash but they did not accept dollar payments. The pilot did not have rupees. He trekked to the other end of the airport to the money- changers. The ATC was in another corner.

  What most shocked us, after all the embarrassment, was being asked to pay customs duty on the residual fuel in the aircraft. We had 200-plus litres of fuel left over after flying in from Dubai in the tank. The customs officials asked us to pay duty of US$200 on that on the ground that residual fuel amounted to importing fuel into the country.

  This is probably the single most ridiculous regulation I have ever come across. I was reminded of Ramakrishna Hegde’s story about the temple usher and the shoes.

  Putting up a mini-terminal or even creating a makeshift bay for charters involved neither high technology nor major investment. It required only imagination and a concern for human needs and also a realization that the entire bureaucratic infrastructure—the DGCA, the AAI and the customs department—existed simply because people flew in and flew out of airports and paid taxes and levies. This economic driver sustains the exchequer, the very bureaucracy, and the chain of economic activities creating a positive feedback loop. Even today, unless the charter is carrying a VVIP passenger, no airport in India extends basic courtesies: they are left in limbo and have to fend for themselves.

  It was five in the morning by the time we took off for Bengaluru. We had been at the airport for over three hours, had had no sleep or rest, and were utterly exhausted. The welcoming first rays of the sun caressed and soothed us as we touched down. We alone knew how wonderful it felt to arrive home.

  Prelude to the Pilatus

  Jayanth and I were driving to Jakkur one day, discussing ways of expanding our helicopter business. We now had two helicopters in Bengaluru but there was insufficient business to keep them optimally engaged. There were two ways of expanding business. One: increase the number of flying hours. Two: induct more helicopters. Also, the future of the business depended on a national presence: we had to set up bases in other cities for comprehensive growth.

  The complexion of politics was changing at the time. The common perception was that national parties had neglected regional development. This sentiment fed the soil on which regional parties had begun to grow. Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party had become chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, and he was the new kid on the block. S.M. Krishna was the chief minister of Karnataka. Although he belonged to the old guard and to the Congress, Krishna had initiated a number of measures to accelerate the development of the IT and biotechnology industries in the state. In spirit he was like Chandrababu Naidu. There was ferment of a similar kind in Tamil Nadu where new energies were being released, and also in Maharashtra and Gujarat. The reforms at the Centre had encouraged competition among the states to create the best climate for investment, by national and international business organizations. Infrastructure-creation was one of them and many projects had taken off.

  Chandrababu Naidu depended heavily on IT and wanted to make Hyderabad the technology capital of the country, dispossessing Bengaluru of its lead. Naidu was an energetic driver of infrastructure projects and industrial development, and with a clear IT focus. He ran the state government on corporate lines and received the Best CEO Award instituted by the Economic Times.

  Naidu was once in Bengaluru to address the Karnataka Chamber of Commerce. I attended the address and closely listened to his speech. Naidu said he wanted Karnataka entrepreneurs to come and invest in Andhra Pradesh. His government would lay out a red-carpet welcome. Naidu had his detractors and was criticized for his obsession with private sector participation in development. It is usual for the political opposition in India to take an adversarial position and oppose all that the ruling party does. The opposition derives its identity from opposing.

  There is a joke about an opposition leader shipwrecked on an island. After several years of isolated existence, a ship strays close to the island’s shoreline. The castaway screams for attention and the captain of the ship decides to rescue the man. The captain boards a rescue boat and paddles out to shore. The forsaken leader has been jabbering and gesticulating non-stop. As soon as the captain disembarks, the man accosts him, asking, ‘Are you the government? Are you the government?’ And without waiting for a reply, he provides answer. He
says, ‘If you are the government, then I am the opposition!’

  Detractors spoke disparagingly of his heavy dependence on helicopters as a mode of transport, remarking that Naidu spent more time inside a helicopter than on the ground.

  We were well on the way to Jakkur when I received a call from an acquaintance of mine. A former officer in the defence forces, he was now a pilot with the AP government. He said Chandrababu Naidu’s helicopter had been grounded for major maintenance. The very next moment I thought aloud to Jayanth, ‘If Naidu’s helicopter has been grounded, he must surely require another. Why don’t we station one helicopter in Hyderabad?’

  Without waiting for a response, I asked Jayanth to turn back. I suggested we go pack some clothes and ride a helicopter out to Hyderabad. I asked A. P. Singh, the pilot, to fly us out. Sugandha Raj of the marketing team joined us. We returned with bags packed and took off without further ado.

  We landed at the Hyderabad airport and went straight to the secretariat. We did not have an appointment but did not wait to seek one. That would have taken us ten days to obtain. I confirmed with the pilot that Naidu was in the secretariat. I walked into the office of the CM’s personal secretary, a senior IAS officer and introduced myself as an entrepreneur from Bengaluru. I said I had heard about Mr Naidu’s address to the Karnataka Chamber of Commerce inviting businesses from Bengaluru to invest in Andhra Pradesh. I had also heard that the CM’s helicopter had been grounded and had therefore come to offer my helicopter for his use.

  I said I wanted to set up a helicopter base for Andhra Pradesh. I explained how the helicopter had become an important tool of development and was crucial for the reform and investment process under way in Andhra Pradesh. He understood me and I promised to have a helicopter ready in five minutes for the chief minister if he ordered one.

  The secretary thought I was joking because it is common knowledge that to acquire a resource for government use involves a process, and a great deal of time: letters are written, bids are called for, tenders are opened and compared, till eventually the award is made. A company could be reasonably expected to take several days to provide a resource, and the helicopter was not a common resource. I convinced the secretary that I was extremely serious and said, ‘I’m not joking. I’ve flown in a helicopter to your city. I’ll leave it behind for the CM’s use. I can take an Indian Airlines flight back to Bengaluru.’