It was a plan that could take off and bring me handsome returns or crash-land and ruin me forever. It was a risky investment but I went ahead and bought a not-in-use aeroplane. I emptied my savings and sold ancestral property to raise the Rs 2 crore required for the plane’s purchase from Lloyd’s UK (the aircraft’s insurers) and setting up the business. As a young boy, I was thrilled to see the Indian Airforce fighter planes zooming over our village in Haryana. My gut feeling was that children even now are fascinated by planes and would be willing to pay for seeing the inside of one.
In 2000, after retiring voluntarily from the cargo division of German carrier, Lufthansa, I started a PVC pipes manufacturing business. But I kept in touch with all my friends in the aviation industry where I had spent two decades. It was in 2003 that sources told me about an Indian Airlines plane lying at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi airport that was no longer airworthy after crashing into a wall at an airport.
By May, it was mine. But buying the plane wasthe easiest part of the job. How would I carry it? Where would I keep the plane? We had bought a piece of land in Dwarka, west Delhi and I decided to park the plane there.
The aircraft had to be brought to the place in pieces. I hired about 10 ex-colleagues for dismantling and reassembling the plane. It took 16 months. While we were still putting the aeroplane together, a media report about the venture generated a lot of interest. Even before the November 2004 launch, schools and colleges had contacted me for tours. Within a month, I had signed an exclusive contract with Frankfinn for training cabin crew and maintenance engineers.
Today, monthly revenues from the aeroplane touch Rs 5 lakh. Airlines like Indigo conduct emergency drills for their staff on it. Last year, I started the Centre of Civil Aviation Training, a government-approved institution that conducts a three-year aeroplane maintenance engineering course. The purchase of one aeroplane has opened several business possibilities for me.
