How a schoolteacher’s son transformed Indian air travel with 2 old planes and Rs 5 crore

Even before that, this person was a soldier in the Indian army. An innovative agriculturist. And a failed politician to boot. Perhaps this is what laid the foundation for the grit and vision that was required to take air travel to the masses. 

The person, Capt G.R. Gopinath, realised that vision and in the process changed Indian aviation forever. Unfortunately, while the take off was smooth, and the airline did cruise high up for some time, its ending was abrupt and unfortunate. 

In an exclusive long conversation with financialexpress.com, Capt G.R. Gopinath shares his own story. And as one would expect of him, he does not skip the parts where things went wrong. 

A rural upbringing outside the classroom 

Gopinath grew up in a village called Gorur in Hassan district, Karnataka, a small, picturesque village sitting on the banks of the Himavati river. His father was a schoolteacher, and a poor one in the financial sense, though Gopinath is quick with the distinction. “They were poor in resources,” he said, “but there was a wealth of values, and an aristocracy in their simple life.”

His father’s idea of education had little to do with classrooms. He didn’t send Gopinath to school until the fifth standard, preferring instead to take him to the river, to the fields, through Gandhi’s autobiography and the dialogues of Socrates. He pointed out labourers singing while they planted rice in monsoon mud, wet to their bones, still singing, and told his son to pay attention. He was a Brahmin vegetarian who quietly admired the nutritional ingenuity of communities eating crabs and greens foraged from paddy fields. 

When an exam for a military school was announced in the seventh standard, Gopinath was the only student in his class to raise his hand. The reason was uncomplicated. “I was a puny kid,” he said, laughing at the memory. In his village, the roadside eateries were called military hotels because soldiers ate non-vegetarian food and became strong. His father had said so. “If you join the military, you will become strong.” That was enough of a reason for a puny seventh-grader.

He failed the first attempt. The exam was in English; he had studied in Kannada. His headmaster wrote to the Ministry of Defence in fury. A second exam was conducted in Kannada. Gopinath passed. 

“In all affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted,” Gopinath said, citing Bertrand Russell.

From the Dinajpur sector to Chola Pass: The crucible of war 

From Sainik School in Bijapur, Gopinath went on to the National Defence Academy in Pune. He was commissioned into the Indian Army in June 1971, at twenty, among the first officers his school produced. Within months, he was in the war that created Bangladesh, serving with the 52 Mountain Regiment in the Dinajpur sector. The Pakistani army surrendered in fifteen days. Ninety thousand soldiers, with their generals, laid down their arms.

He spent subsequent years posted at the Chola Pass, 15,300 feet on the Chinese border, minus thirty in winter, food arriving by mule or airdrop, frostbite a genuine occupational hazard. 

Eight years after joining, with his parents aging, his siblings choosing corporate careers abroad, and a growing conviction that there was a different kind of life to build, he resigned. His salary was Rs 1,350 a month. His gratuity came to Rs 6,350. “Without a thought for the morrow,” he said, “I said, let me go and discover a new life.”

Thirty acres of scrub: Building a pesticide-free sericulture model 

Back home, Gopinath’s family was given a compensation plot in exchange for their agricultural land submerged by the Hemavathi dam. His uncles wanted nothing to do with it. Too remote, too barren. 

Gopinath went to see it on his Enfield, walked five kilometres from the nearest road, crossed a stream, and stood in the middle of thirty acres of thick scrub and thorn.

“I said, ” Oh my God. There’s nothing. But I can create something out of this land,” Gopinath said.

He came back from Bengaluru with a secondhand army tent, a young Doberman, and a captured Pakistani rifle that had been allotted to him after the war. 

With him came a young boy, fifteen or sixteen years old, who helped him work the land. They pitched camp and began clearing. Standing on the land that first time, Gopinath looked around and started doing the arithmetic of a working farm in his head.

Silks, Rolex and a global recognition for the wartime soldier

The silkworm operation became the heart of it. Gopinath built a natural farming model, sericulture without pesticides, working with the ecosystem rather than against it.

 He had watched chemical farming destroy the very web it depended on: pesticides killing caterpillars that fed birds that cross-pollinated crops, beneficial insects were wiped out along with the pests, and the soil was growing progressively sterile. 

His farm did the opposite, and people came from across India to see it. By the time the Rolex Award for Enterprise found him in the 1990s, a Rolex watch, $10,000, and recognition that carried real weight, he had become something of an evangelist. 

He set up an agriculture consultancy, a team of engineers, horticulturists and drip-irrigation specialists, advising farmers across Karnataka on making the land viable without poisoning it.

He married on the farm, his wife arriving in a bullock cart to see the land. The wheels of the cart were missing their axle pins for the entire four-kilometre journey. 

Her mother told her she still had time to say no. She didn’t.

The customer-first blueprint: turning a strand closeout into 8 dealerships 

When the Royal Enfield dealership in Hassan closed without warning and left Gopinath without customer support for his vehicle, he didn’t go home. He went to Chennai, walked into the company’s headquarters, and told the general manager that his customer service was terrible.

 “I may not know anything about the business,” he said, “but I know what a customer wants.” He walked out with a dealership and eventually ran eight branches. He also took on a stock-broking franchise when a boom briefly made that viable.

The electoral reality check: Shifting focus from politics to job creation 

By the late 1980s came Capt Gopinath’s first brush with politics and elections. With the backing from the BJP, he worked towards understanding the issues of the 420 villages under his constituency. He lost the election. He lost his deposit, too. 

It also settled something: the greatest service he could render was not to hold office but to create jobs. He had already employed two hundred people. He needed to think much bigger.

The epiphany at Phoenix: Why carpenters and mechanics deserve to fly 

Back in Bengaluru in the mid-1990s, Gopinath reconnected with Captain K.J. Samuel, an old Army friend, a helicopter pilot, a gallantry award winner from Kashmir.

 He was a man who had ended up taking a job as an administrative security officer at a private firm because there was nothing else. “This is a gallantry award winner, still in his forties, three children, no job,” Gopinath recalled. “I was devastated.”

Together, they founded Deccan Aviation in 1995. Getting a licence for the helicopter charter business took two years and nine months, a bureaucratic maze that Gopinath eventually cut through.

The low-cost airline idea came later, in 2002, at an airport in Phoenix, Arizona. Gopinath was there for a helicopter exhibition. On his Southwest Airlines flight, he was seated next to a large man in shorts, a carpenter taking his family to the Grand Canyon for a vacation.

After talking to him, Gopinath realised that the carpenter flew regularly because the fares were low enough to allow it. The observation wouldn’t let Gopinath stay calm. “Why aren’t carpenters flying in our country?” he said. “Why aren’t nurses flying? A mechanic is more important than any officer — because if a mechanic doesn’t reach, the entire machinery collapses.”

Phoenix airport told him it handled a thousand flights a day. India, in 2002, had around 400 flights for the entire country. On the way home, he passed through Luton, London’s smallest international airport, and found it was carrying 14 million passengers a year. India was carrying 13 million. “I didn’t need a McKinsey to tell me we needed a low-cost airline,” he said.

How the Re 1 ticket captured 22% market share 

Air Deccan launched on August 25, 2003, on a Bengaluru–Hubli route. Gopinath’s model was straightforward: no free food, no frills, one economy class, point-to-point routing so aircraft weren’t sitting idle waiting on connections. 

The aircraft flew twelve to thirteen hours daily, against the seven or eight hours full-service carriers managed. He eliminated agents, converted a thousand post offices in Karnataka into Internet ticketing points, and built 7,000 points of sale through petrol stations and retail outlets. 

When a minister called from Parliament to protest that the airline wasn’t giving passengers water, Gopinath was unmoved. “I’m a transportation company, not a restaurant. Do you get water on a bus?”

Then came the Re 1 ticket, part marketing masterstroke, part statement of intent. Nearly three million passengers reportedly flew on the promotional fare, he said. 

“The idea was to make more people dream of buying a ticket — so that someone buys it for one rupee and comes back at two rupees,” Gopinath explained. He was competing with trains, he said, not other airlines. 

Within three years, Air Deccan held roughly 22% of the domestic market, operated across more than sixty destinations, and had connected airports, Hubli, Bellary, Kulu, Shimla, Pathankot, Rajamundry, Jabalpur, that had never seen scheduled commercial service. IndiGo, SpiceJet and GoAir followed in the trail Air Deccan introduced. 

Deccan Aviation went public in 2006. The French government awarded Gopinath the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur that same year.

The story of growth, ambition and regrets 

Growth had made the airline fragile in the ways fast growth tends to. Five new airlines entered the market, poaching pilots and engineers until salaries quadrupled. 

Private equity partners who had funded the expansion wanted out. In 2007, Vijay Mallya‘s UB Group acquired a 26% stake for Rs 550 crore.

The plan on paper made sense: Kingfisher as the premium brand, Air Deccan as the low-cost one, sharing operations and infrastructure. 

Once Mallya was inside the business, his view was that low-cost would not work in India. The board went with him. The airline became Simplifly Deccan, then Kingfisher Red. The model Gopinath had built was steadily dismantled.

“He did not cheat me. But he robbed me of my dreams,” Gopinath said. 

Gopinath sold his shares and left. Kingfisher Red was shut down in 2011 as the wider Kingfisher business collapsed. The sale was his greatest regret.

Still going

However, that did not stop him from dreaming. He launched a cargo airline, Deccan 360, in 2009, which eventually closed. 

He contested Bangalore South as an independent the same year. He then joined AAP but quit within 6 months, citing lack of internal democracy and the authoritarian ways of Kejriwal.

In 2017, he brought Air Deccan back under the government’s UDAN regional connectivity scheme, flying 19-seater Beechcraft aircraft to underserved towns, until the pandemic shut that down too.

He has written three books, with a fourth due from HarperCollins. He mentors people who aspire to be someone. He writes on aviation, entrepreneurship and society. 

He is, by his own admission, still drawn to farming, the soil, the silkworms, the ecosystem logic he has been arguing for since before it was fashionable.

‘Never say never’ – Dream on

When asked what he is working on now, he did not give a straightforward answer. “Never say never. Let’s see what will happen. Maybe something like a captain’s last hurrah,” he said, laughing.

Whether or not there is a last hurrah, the record holds. A school teacher’s son from a village on the Himavati, who joined the army because he wanted to eat non-vegetarian food and grow strong, ended up changing the economics of airline travel for an entire country. 

“The glory of man,” he said, with the ease of someone who has earned the right to the line, “is not in never falling or failing, but in rising each time you fall.”

Disclaimer: This profile is based on original reporting, including direct communication with Capt. Gopinath. To ensure a comprehensive perspective, FinancialExpress.com corroborated this information with public records and third-party sources. This content is not sponsored, and FinancialExpress.com retains full editorial independence and final authority over all editorial decisions.