Seventy-three years to the day on 1st August 1953 since Jawaharlal Nehru pressed a button at Safdarjung Airport and sent a Viking and a Dakota into the sky, the men and women who kept those aircraft, and every aircraft that followed them, flying are still fighting to be seen. This is their story, told not through fleet counts or boardroom minutes, but through what it cost them and what they gave.
Nationalisation in 1953 was resisted by J.R.D. Tata. He argued it would bring bureaucracy, lower morale and poorer service. Nehru wrote to reassure him there was no conspiracy. The government nonetheless pressed ahead, absorbing Air India Limited, Air Services of India, Airways (India), Bharat Airways, Deccan Airways, Himalayan Aviation, Indian National Airways, Kalinga Airlines and the international arm into the two new corporations. J.R.D. accepted the chairmanship of Air India International and a directorship of Indian Airlines. He remained chairman of the international carrier until 1978, micro-managing standards even as the political climate grew more demanding.
Indian Airlines inherited a patchwork fleet of Dakotas, Vikings and Skymasters and roughly seven thousand staff of uneven pay scales and cultures. It knitted the country together in the decades when air travel was still rare. It linked and initiated to every trunk routes, monsoon operations, remote airfields, the patient work of turning eight private companies into one reliable domestic network. Air India, free to concentrate on the long-haul, built a reputation for punctuality, hospitality and style that made the Maharaja a global symbol. It was among the first airlines to operate an all-jet fleet. It carried the nation’s flag, its art, its food and its manners across continents.
For more than four decades Indian Airlines held the domestic monopoly. Every new city that appeared on the aviation map of India was first reached by one of its aircraft. The first flight into a provincial airfield, the first scheduled service that made a remote town accessible, the patient work of proving that a route could carry enough passengers and cargo to justify the expense. All of it was done by Indian Airlines and its workers. Ground handling equipment was positioned, operations infrastructure was built, local staff were trained, and the economics of the route were established with much care and effort. Only later, after the open-skies policy of the mid-1990s, did private carriers arrive to harvest the denser, more profitable sectors. The entire domestic aviation map of India was drawn, line by line, by the people who flew and maintained Indian Airlines aircraft long before the private sector decided the numbers made sense.
The workforce that grew out of that mandate became something the balance sheets could never capture. In Hyderabad a modest Link Trainer facility of the old Deccan Airways became the Central Training Establishment, later the Rajiv Gandhi Central Training Establishment. At its peak it was an aviation academy respected among the finest anywhere. Boeing and Airbus simulators ran almost around the clock. It trained pilots, flight engineers, aircraft maintenance engineers, technicians, cabin crew, commercial officers, aviation security staff and ramp handlers. It was the first airline institute in India to receive DGCA approval as a Type Rating Training Organisation. For a time it aspired to deemed-university status. It was more than a training school. It was the institutional memory of Indian civil aviation. Today when we look at the shortages of pilots, engineers and other staff in India, we find that noone in the government is interested in restoring the finest aviation institution but are quick to abandon it and to recognize them as piece of real estate reflected on balance sheets.
When Indian Airlines brought in the Airbus A320 in the late 1980s, its own engineers many trained at that academy, learned to strip, inspect and overhaul the aircraft in-house. Hangars in Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and elsewhere became places where Indian technicians performed the heavy checks that other carriers were still sending abroad. The knowledge was hard-won. It came from years of night shifts and the quiet pride of signing an aircraft back into service.
That capability was later carved away. Under the turnaround plans the engineering organisation was hived off into AI Engineering Services Limited. Ground handling was separated into what became AI Airport Services Limited. When the Tatas took the airline back in 2022, these two companies and their skilled workforces remained with the government under AI Assets Holding Limited. The engineers who once kept the national carrier’s aircraft flying could overhaul a jet engine, and the ground staff who had worked the ramps round the clock and also provided outsourced services to other airlines for decades, found themselves severed from the identity they had built. Their talents are only partially used. The deep integration that once existed between the flying programme and its own overhaul shops has been broken. Today they are being deprived of basic facilities that an airline workers gets like subject to load air travel.
The human toll is only now surfacing in full. Thousand retired Air India and Indian Airlines personnel remain trapped in what one retiree called a bureaucratic no-man’s-land. Many had poured their own savings into a 1994 self-contributory pension scheme that collapsed within three years, leaving most living on a fixed Rs.500 to Rs.1200 pension per month after paying Rs.1000-Rs.1500 in the 90s of 1% to 5% of their salaries contribution. Medical cover that once existed in-house has become unreliable and one has to spend money to get medical care in designated hospitals only and majority of which refused to entertain them. Retirees spread all across India evenly, CGHS coverages is scarce in two tier-three tier cities but in major metropolitan also it is concented in Delhi only. Age is doing what bureaucracy would not. An estimated twenty to twenty-five of these pensioners die every month. More than five thousand have gone in the last four years, still asking who they actually belong to. The burden of overall pension and medical is reducing in number with each passing day on the government. The promise of pension, medical and free passage is not being met by authorities.
Even those still employed have not been spared. Legacy non-flying staff have been offered voluntary retirement and, when they declined, retrenched without notice. The airline colonies that once housed generations of families have emptied. The people who built these institutions are now labelled legacy workers, a term that carries the implication of something inherited an inconvenient liability.
Yet the pattern of their service never changed. In 1990 Air India entered the Guinness Book for airlifting more people than any civil airline in history during the Gulf War evacuation. Many of the crew were already back on duty before the formal awards could be handed out. Whenever the nation needed lift, they supplied it, quietly, and went back to work the next day. It began in 1990 with the Kuwait airlift, when over 170,000 Indians were evacuated from Kuwait and Iraq during the Gulf War, more than 111,000 of them flown from Amman to Mumbai across 488 flights. The pattern repeated through the 1990s with special flights to Yemen in 1994, Operation Amnesty Airlift for undocumented workers in the UAE in 1996, and evacuation of Indians ahead of Saudi Arabia's amnesty deadline in 1997. In 2006, the airline brought Indians home from Lebanon amid the Israel-Lebanon conflict, and in 2011 it mounted two major operations almost simultaneously, Operation Safe Homecoming, evacuating over 15,000 Indians from a Libya convulsed by civil war, and a rescue of 11,345 Indians from Cairo during Egypt's political turmoil. Libyan instability again prompted evacuation flights to Djerba in 2014, and in 2015 Operation Raahat saw the airline help extract nearly 4,700 Indians and almost 2,000 foreign nationals from a Yemen torn apart by civil war and Saudi-led intervention. Then came COVID-19. Flights first pulled Indians out of Wuhan in January-February 2020, before the government launched the Vande Bharat Mission in May 2020, which grew into the largest evacuation mission in human history, eventually repatriating roughly 7.2 million Indians worldwide across phases that alone carried over 12.5 lakh people by January 2021, with Air India Group flying more than 6,000 of the over 14,500 inbound flights recorded by the end of 2020. Even as the pandemic ravaged its balance sheet pushing revenue down to ₹12,104 crore and losses to ₹7,083 crore in 2020-21, with fleet utilisation collapsing to just 6.3 million passengers, the airline kept flying air-bubble and repatriation routes to 35 countries through 2021 and into early 2022.
They drew the aviation map of India, city by city and route by route, at public expense. They built the training academy that once ranked among the best, the in-house A320 engineering capability, the ground-handling systems that still serve airports across the country, and the operational discipline that kept monsoon-battered Dakotas flying when no one else would. They asked in return only for what had been promised - dignity in old age, a pension that matched the contributions they had made, and the simple acknowledgement that the airline they served still recognised them as its own.
Seventy-three years after Nehru’s Viking lifted off, that debt remains unpaid. The new Air India celebrates transformation and a younger workforce. The older hands remain in the background. India is short of precisely the trained skills and institutional memory that once existed in abundance inside its own national airlines. The loss is not only theirs.