He Flew the First Plane. His Family Bought It Back 68 Years Later. The Extraordinary Story of Air India

On 15 October 1932, a young man climbed into the cockpit of a single-engine de Havilland Puss Moth at Karachi's Drigh Road aerodrome. He was 28 years old. He was India's first licensed pilot. He had convinced his family's company — Tata Sons — to bid for an airmail contract from Imperial Airways, won it, and assembled a tiny fleet of two aircraft to execute it.

His name was Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata. The world would come to know him simply as JRD.

He took off from Karachi carrying a bag of airmail. He flew to Ahmedabad, then Bombay, where he landed ahead of schedule at the Juhu airstrip — a waterlogged patch of land on the edge of the Arabian Sea. A second aircraft, piloted by former Royal Air Force pilot Neville Vincent, continued the route to Madras.

India's first commercial flight had taken place.

There were no passengers. There was no fanfare beyond what a small group of onlookers at each airstrip could provide. But there was something far more significant: a vision. JRD Tata had not merely flown a bag of mail from Karachi to Bombay. He had demonstrated that India could have a modern airline — one built on punctuality, precision, and the conviction that a country of this size and this ambition deserved to be connected by air.

The company he founded that day was called Tata Airlines. Within five years, its profits had grown from ₹66,000 to ₹6,00,000, with a punctuality record of 99.4%. By 1939, its routes had extended to Trivandrum, Delhi, Colombo, and Lahore. The airline that had started with two Puss Moths was becoming, against every expectation, a serious enterprise.

The Name That Became a Nation's Pride

In 1946, after the second World War had reshaped the world, Tata Airlines converted to a public limited company and was renamed Air India. The rebrand was more than cosmetic — it was a statement of national identity for a country on the verge of independence.

Two years later, in 1948, with India now sovereign and the government acquiring a 49% stake in the airline, Air India International was formed for international services. On 8 June 1948, a Lockheed Constellation named Malabar Princess departed from Bombay bound for London Heathrow — making Air India the first Asian airline to offer international service. The route passed through Cairo and Geneva. India had arrived in the global sky.

The 1950s and 1960s were the golden era of Air India. Its cabins were lavish. Its service was impeccable. It carried royalty, heads of state, film stars, and business leaders in an atmosphere that was equal parts Indian warmth and international sophistication. JRD Tata, who remained deeply involved in the airline's operations, was famously meticulous — wandering the aircraft making notes, wiping dirty counters himself, personally inspecting the smallest details of the passenger experience.

In 1960, Air India inducted its first Boeing 707 — becoming the first Asian airline to enter the jet age. In 1962, it became the world's first all-jet airline, replacing its entire propeller fleet with jets. These were not incremental achievements. They were firsts that placed India's national carrier at the leading edge of global aviation.

The Maharaja Who Was Never Royal

In 1946, the same year Tata Airlines became Air India, the airline's commercial director Bobby Kooka did something that would define the brand's personality for the next eight decades.

He commissioned a mascot.

Working with Umesh Rao, an artist at the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, Kooka created the Maharaja — a mustachioed, turbaned figure with an aquiline nose and the demeanour of someone who had seen the world and found it mildly amusing. The Maharaja was designed for the airline's memo pads. He quickly escaped into advertising.

Kooka described his creation with characteristic wit: "We call him a Maharajah for want of a better description. But his blood isn't blue. He may look like royalty, but he isn't royal."

That tension — royal in appearance, democratic in spirit — was precisely the brand identity that Air India needed. The Maharaja was simultaneously a symbol of Indian elegance and an everyman figure who could be adapted to any situation, any country, any cultural context. Over the following decades, he appeared as a sumo wrestler, an Arab merchant, a lover boy, a Capuchin monk, and a pavement artist — always recognisably himself, always speaking for an airline that understood hospitality as theatre and service as storytelling.

The Maharaja became one of the most iconic brand mascots in Indian advertising history — a symbol so distinctive and so deeply associated with the airline that every subsequent attempt to update or retire him has been met with public resistance.

Nationalisation: The Dream Handed Over

In 1953, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's government nationalised India's airline industry under the Air Corporations Act. Tata Airlines — the company JRD had built from two aircraft and a bag of mail — was taken from the family that had created it and handed to the state.

Eight domestic airlines were merged into Indian Airlines Corporation for domestic services. Air India International remained as India's international carrier, later shortened simply to Air India in 1962.

JRD Tata accepted the government's invitation to remain as chairman of Air India. He accepted no salary. He remained chairman for 25 years — bringing the same standards of quality and the same meticulous attention to detail that had built the airline in the first place. In 1978, the Morarji Desai government removed him — without explanation, without courtesy, without so much as a personal communication. He learned of his dismissal from his replacement. He had served Air India for 25 years without a rupee of compensation.

The public outrage was immediate and lasting. Letters of protest poured in. Resignations followed from within the company. But the decision stood.

What followed JRD's removal was, gradually, a different story. Bureaucratic management, political interference, impractical policies, and mounting losses began to accumulate. By the time the government moved to divest the airline decades later, Air India's debt had exceeded ₹50,000 crore.

The World Record Nobody Wanted to Need

In the summer of 1990, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait. In the hours that followed, hundreds of thousands of people were stranded — including over 170,000 Indian workers and their families, scattered across Kuwait and Iraq, with no way home.

The Indian government turned to Air India.

What followed was the largest civilian evacuation by a commercial airline in the history of the world. Over 59 days, from 13 August to 11 October 1990, Air India operated 488 flights from Amman, Jordan — covering the 4,117 kilometre distance to Mumbai — and brought home more than 111,000 Indian nationals.

The operation entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest evacuation ever carried out by a civil airliner. It was later depicted in the 2016 Bollywood film Airlift, starring Akshay Kumar. The achievement was not the product of corporate strategy or marketing planning. It was the product of an airline that understood, in its most fundamental institutional identity, that it was not just a commercial enterprise. It was India's airline — and when India needed it, it showed up.

The Return of the Maharaja

On 27 January 2022, 68 years after nationalisation, the Tata Group bought Air India back from the Government of India for ₹18,000 crore — a bid that also absorbed a substantial portion of the airline's accumulated debt. The total deal value was approximately $2.2 billion.

Ratan Tata, then Tata Sons' Chairman Emeritus, posted a two-word response that said everything: "Welcome back, Air India."

The circle that had opened in 1953 had closed. The airline that JRD Tata had built with two aircraft and flown personally on its inaugural journey had come home.

The transformation that followed was systematic and ambitious. Under CEO Campbell Wilson and Chairman Natarajan Chandrasekaran, Air India launched Vihaan.AI — a five-year, then ten-year transformation programme built on five pillars: safe and reliable operations, a best-in-class customer experience, a diverse and growing network, operational excellence, and a culture of empowerment.

In February 2023, Air India placed an order for 470 aircraft from Airbus and Boeing — the largest aircraft order in Indian aviation history and one of the largest ever placed globally, valued at $70 billion at list prices. The order included 250 Airbus aircraft and 220 Boeing aircraft, covering both narrow-body and wide-body types.

In August 2023, Air India unveiled a new brand identity — a new logo called "The Vista," inspired by the window of an aircraft and the rising sun; a new colour palette of deep red, aubergine, and gold; and a refined role for the Maharaja, who was given a younger, more contemporary appearance and positioned as a symbol of premium Indian hospitality in elevated touchpoints such as First Class cabins, exclusive lounges, and luxury product lines.

In November 2024, Air India and Vistara — Tata Group's other airline, a joint venture with Singapore Airlines — merged into a single Air India entity, with Singapore Airlines holding a 25.1% stake in the combined airline. The merger created India's largest international carrier and its second largest airline overall by fleet size.

In FY 2025, Air India reported revenues of ₹61,080 crore.

The Marketing Strategy That Was Always About More Than Flying

Air India's marketing has never operated on a single dimension. Across its nearly century-long history, it has built its brand through a set of strategies that are distinctive and, in several cases, impossible for any competitor to replicate.

The Maharaja as cultural diplomat. The decision to build the brand's personality around a single mascot — one capable of appearing in hundreds of different cultural contexts while remaining unmistakably himself — gave Air India a marketing asset that has outlasted logos, taglines, ownership structures, and even nationalisation. Bobby Kooka's 1946 creation became the most recognisable face of Indian aviation globally, appearing in campaigns across dozens of countries and adapting the Maharaja to local customs, humour, and cultural references. No other Indian airline has ever produced a brand character of comparable longevity or cultural resonance.

Firsts as brand signals. Air India has consistently used aviation firsts — first Asian airline for international service in 1948, first Asian airline in the jet age in 1960, world's first all-jet airline in 1962 — not merely as operational milestones but as brand statements. Each first communicated something about the airline's ambition and its refusal to be a follower in its own industry.

Vihaan.AI: transformation as marketing. Under Tata ownership, Air India has made its own transformation story into its most powerful marketing narrative. The 470-aircraft order, the Vistara merger, the new brand identity, the recruitment of international talent — each announcement has been a statement of intent to passengers, to employees, and to the global aviation industry. The airline is not merely modernising its fleet. It is communicating, through every decision it makes publicly, that Air India intends to compete with Emirates, Singapore Airlines, and Qatar Airways — and that the transformation is serious, resourced, and irreversible.

The Maharaja Club and loyalty architecture. The merger of Air India's Flying Returns programme — India's first frequent flyer loyalty programme — with Vistara's Club Vistara into a unified Maharaja Club is both a product decision and a brand decision. By naming the loyalty programme after the Maharaja, Air India connects its most commercially significant customer relationship tool to its most iconic brand asset.

The Long Arc of Indian Aviation

Ninety-three years after JRD Tata climbed into a Puss Moth in Karachi, Air India flies to 43 domestic and 44 international destinations with a fleet of 191 aircraft. It is India's only airline operating non-stop long-haul services to destinations across Europe, North America, and Australia.

The story it carries is unlike that of any other airline in the world. It was born from the personal ambition of a man who taught himself to fly and used that skill to connect a nation. It was taken from him by a government that recognised its value but not his. It was run into debt over decades of institutional mismanagement. It evacuated 111,000 people from a war zone and entered the world records. And it was brought back, 68 years after it was taken, by the family that had created it in the first place.

The Maharaja, who has been redesigned but never retired, stands at the entrance of Air India's premium cabins today — younger, more stylish, but still himself.

He was never royal. But he has always been irreplaceable.