From women posing as men to rooftop aircraft, wonders in India never cease

What on earth is going on? I was still trying to recover from the story of the lady who married two women over four years posing as a man (this deserves a separate piece later) when I learned that a Jet airways pilot, Amol Yadav, had assembled an aircraft on his building rooftop in Mumbai, managed to get the director general of civil aviation (DGCA) to register it and convince the Maharashtra government to announce a Rs 350 billion investment in a new “aerospace hub”. Wonders in this country will simply never cease!

Newspaper reports say that the plan is to build a prototype 19-seater plane and “three more similar planes” — whatever that means. The immediate funding required for this will be Rs 2 billion — money that is proposed to be spent in the next six months. The eventual goal is to make 600 19-seater planes in the next two-three years and then take it to 1,300 planes after that.

The moment the story sunk in, I quickly made a few calls but more the number of people I spoke to, the more fantastic the story became and the less sense I could make of it.

A senior official in Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’ office confirmed that the project was being pursued in all “seriousness”. He said there will be other aviation and aerospace companies present at the aerospace hub — without specifying which ones — and that this would create an additional 10,000 jobs for the state. He added that the government had allotted 157 acres of land in Palghar, Maharashtra. It appears the Maharashtra government has even played a role in assisting Yadav get certification from DGCA. Sensing my skepticism, he further asked me to speak to Amol Yadav and for some reason his brother, making it sound a bit like a mom and pop store.

A senior commander with Jet airways (the company however clarified that this is his personal initiative), Yadav, however, was not too forthcoming. He said that TAC 003 is a single engine six-seater aircraft assembled on his rooftop in Charkop, Mumbai. When I delved into how many hours the aircraft had been tested, flown and so on, he refused to answer any detailed queries saying that “regulatory matters could not be discussed over the phone” and that I should visit him in person.

Yadav added that post his graduation in Mumbai, he left for the US to train as a pilot where he even “owned an aircraft”. He appeared to take offence to my question on whether he was an engineer — a natural query to my mind — and asked me to point out one engineer in India who had built an aircraft and to show him the rules and regulations that required aircraft to be built only by engineers.

Before I am labeled anti-national or “not in touch with technology” (which I am delighted to admit is true), I would like to raise a few points that struck me as rather odd. 

Thrust Aircraft Private Limited — as I understood it — is a single person outfit, headed by someone without an engineering background and which is now seeking to raise Rs 2 billion to make two types of planes. 

If this is so, on what basis did the Fadnavis government sign a memorandum of understanding with this company? Is this single project enough to trigger talk of investing Rs 350 billion — a large sum by any standard — in an aerospace hub? Which other companies did they speak to and which ones had evinced interest?

Further, on what basis did the DGCA register the aircraft since it is yet to fly at all and what precisely does registration mean since it clearly cannot be a certificate of air worthiness since the machine is yet to be airborne?

I would also like to know what Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) and National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) with their cumulative experience of a century have to say about this since their dream of building an indigenous aircraft in India has met little success for the last three decades. NAL’s attempts with SARAS since the 1990s are well known and documented and it is only this January that the DGCA has finally cleared the decks for HAL’s upgraded version of the Dornier although the license for production of the aircraft was acquired way back in 1983.

Is it possible then that this pilot with no engineering experience and background can miraculously produce a made-in-India airplane atop his building and the government has bought into it, no questions asked? If yes, wonders in India will truly never cease.