Not so long ago, a bespectacled, balding “common man”, the spitting image of the cartoon hero, started his dream airline venture, made the cartoon hero his mascot and changed the way middle class Indians flew.  Not only by buying an exorbitantly-priced ticket to get someplace in a family emergency, but going on vacations and pilgrimage, and visiting family and friends with tickets costing as low as one rupee.

Earlier this week, G.R. Gopinath, 55, founder of the no-frills Air Deccan, watched as Vijay Mallya of Kingfisher Airlines and Naresh Goyal of Jet Airways, the two chiefs of India’s largest airlines embraced each other, their faces beaming out of the front pages of newspapers. For Gopinath who sold his airline to Mallya of Kingfisher, the embrace of “two fat cats”, as he described, signified something more — the death of his budget airline dream.

Five years ago Gopinath, whose origins are in a dusty Karnataka village, set up Air Deccan which he announced would be the “Udupi stand-and-eat” of the airline industry.  Efficiency and innovation would help keep costs low and attract a high turnover of customers. His airline seats were “first-come-first-served”, much like mofussil buses. Thousands of Indians logged into the internet for the first time to buy cheap air tickets, cutting out travel agents and their commission. Tickets were available at post offices and petrol stations.  In remote towns, dusty airports were cleaned and cleared of stray animals in anticipation of the first Air Deccan flight.

At its peak, Air Deccan was flying 700,000 passengers a month, networking 67 Indian cities and spawning a whole rash of budget airlines. Suddenly, social barriers were down, and flying was no longer a class-based luxury. In the midst of a haircut, the member of a barbers’ association in Hyderabad told Gopinath thrillingly of how a dozen barbers pooled money and flew to Mumbai.

... contd.