Giving affordable wings to Indians

Captain Gopinath needs no introduction. He is considered the father of low cost air travel in India. Some say he is a visionary; he created a whole new market when he launched India's first low cost airline Air Deccan. Others say, he has the daring to enter a sector where even the Tatas failed. Even his competitors admit that he has succeeded in giving ordinary Indians wings. But what he is not known for is running a profitable and sustainable enterprise - at least not yet. So, does Captain Gopinath want to be a trailblazer or a successful entrepreneur?

CEO, Centre for Asia-Pacific Aviation, Andrew Miller told CNBC-TV18, "I think the vision was very wide, very early on. He is obviously a first mover and sometimes the first movers can be 5-10 years ahead of their time."

Managing Director of Air Deccan, Captain Gopinath explains, "People keep asking me if I'm an evangelist. I'm not, it is more like a evangelical zeal that I have. It so happens that my dreams and the dreams of Air Deccan are aligned with the nation's dreams. It is not that I am just madly trying to get marketshare. We had one flight between Bombay and Delhi once upon a time about two and a half years ago. Jet had about 10 flights and Indian Airlines had 12 flights. They put a flight half an hour before my flight and just slashed the price. So, that they could increase fares in the other sectors and that is what they did."

"They increased the fares in all the other Bombay-Delhi sectors but brought down the fares on that particular flight, when I was flying, to bury me in the sand. The only way to stop that from happening was to increase my size and my scale, which also is one of the key elements of low cost. You cannot be a low cost airline if you have two aircrafts, you need a certain size. I don't consider Air Deccan as a regional airline, we are a national airline going to many regions."

So, when some say he is more aviation-politician than aviation-entrepreneur, have they got the wrong impression? Captain Gopinath feels that it's a perception that people have but he points out that he's as much in the business of building a great airline as anyone else. He understands that people with a bigger corpus of funds and name behind them - like the Tatas - were not given this opportunity. So, he realises he has to figure out how this system works and fast - because now the skies are more open than before.

Even saints have their share of critics. So, while people like Warwick Brady, CEO, Air Deccan admire him for his vision and says he is given the freedom to operate and hire and fire at will, there are others who think, he's not connected enough to his staff.

CEO (India), Centre for Asia-Pacific Aviation, Kapil Kaul says, "I think he is intellectually more stronger than what the market thinks of him and I think he is a visionary. The problem in Air Deccan and the vision of Gopinath is that he is somewhere not connected to the people who work with him."