Captain GR Gopinath burst upon the scene when he floated Air Deccan, India’s first low-cost carrier, some time in 2003. Without a doubt, it was he who brought air travel to the masses. Till then, it was something only for the well-heeled. But he ran it ineptly. For quite some time, there were long flight delays which made airports worse than a fish market. It didn’t get any better once you boarded an Air Deccan aircraft. As there was no seat number on the tickets, there would invariably be a fair amount of jostling for the aisle seats in the front rows.
The business idea was great but the business model wasn’t. In less than five years, the airline had totted up huge losses, Vjay Mallya had come on board as an investor, and Gopinath was out of the company he had founded.
There was no way Gopinath’s autobiography could have been a dull read. And to be fair, Simply Fly: A Deccan Odyssey is a competent piece of work — indulgent in places, under-edited, inadequate in some details, yet racy and engaging. Let’s go through my grouse list first. One, the Air Deccan story begins after you have trudged through no fewer than 250 pages. Of the 380 pages, Gopinath has devoted only about 100 pages to the airline that brought him out of obscurity and gave him his share of fame. Wish there was more on Air Deccan and less on the rest of the stuff.
Two, Gopinath never mentions, right through the book, how much money he made in his various ventures. He explains in great detail how he set up each business with very little money. Admirable, but what were the returns? Maybe that’s not important in the story of an entrepreneur. Success has many measures; money is just one of them. But the picture is incomplete without it. Let me not build a case against the book. It is lucid and rich with personal detail, though the narrative rambles at some stretches.
To run through the initial years, Gopinath was born in a village in the Hassan district of Karnataka, did his primary education in Kannada, attended Sainik School and then joined the Army. He saw action in Bangladesh, but left service after eight years as he felt stifled in his olive greens. Like Mahatma Gandhi, Gopinath wanted to see India first hand before he set out on his own. He tried his hand successfully at farming, motorcycle dealership, restaurants and agriculture consultancy, and unsuccessfully in politics. He joined the Bharatiya Janata Party, though he was not sure of its right-wing ideology. The contacts did come handy when he started Air Deccan years later.
The big moment came when Gopinath started a helicopter service. This is where the pace of the book picks up. How he travelled in his first helicopter from Singapore to Bangalore makes perhaps the most engaging section of the book. There was a need gap, and Gopinath was the first to spot it. A low-cost carrier, at hindsight, was a logical extension.
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What grounded Air Deccan? Gopinath puts the blame on the information technology platform. It proved inadequate and began to crash frequently when the passenger volumes shot up. Rahul Bhatia of Interglobe Technologies was the vendor but, Gopinath alleges, he lost interest because he was setting up his own airline (IndiGo). The switch to the new system was nothing short of disaster. Kingfisher poached its pilots. Others dropped prices. The stock markets turned unhelpful at a time when he had placed an order for 60 aircraft with Airbus.
These are competitive pressures no businessman can wish away. The fact is that it is only now that Indians have found out how to run a low-cost carrier successfully. Its principal costs — aircraft, fuel and staff — are no different from a full-service carrier; what can make the difference is efficiency in operations. How quickly, for example, can you ready your aircraft for another flight? Gopinath had started with a great idea, but lost out in implementation.
Air Deccan had two suitors: Mallya and Anil Ambani. Though Ambani’s team had carried out the due diligence, the two failed to sign on the dotted line. Talks were on, Gopinath was told, with another airline (SpiceJet?), so the deal would have to be put on hold for a while. That is when Gopinath began to renegotiate with Mallya. He was in desperate need of money. From his yacht in Monte Carlo, without going through the books of Air Deccan, in the midst of a party, Mallya agreed to all conditions Gopinath put and checked into the airline in less than a week.
But soon, Mallya began to change the basic logic of Air Deccan. His idea was to draw synergies with Kingfisher Airlines and plug the losses. Thus, Air Deccan was rebranded Simplifly Deccan, and finally Kingfisher Red. That was also the time Gopinath left the company, not on the best of terms with Mallya. Did he create a great institution? It’s not clear if Kingfisher Red is making money even now. But one thing is certain: The brand Air Deccan is history. Did Gopinath sign an agreement with Mallya that he will stay away from the airline business? The book says nothing. If there is no agreement, Gopinath could well return to the crease for a second innings! He has instead chosen to float a cargo airline.
There are three skill sets that seem to have served Gopinath well: His ability to negotiate, his salesmanship and his ability to handle the media. In fact, he learnt his lesson in media management pretty early. Ply them with food and liquor, there is no way they will ignore what you have to say, Gopinath’s first agent advised him. They came, they drank, they ate and then they forgot to write about him. In the Air Deccan years, Gopinath showed consummate skills with the media. Every initiative he took, he recounts in his autobiography, was always lapped up by the media. But he also mentions how he got slammed: Almost every Air Deccan flight had a journalist on board; any delay or hitch, therefore, got enthusiastically reported.
SIMPLY FLY: A DECCAN ODYSSEY
Captain GR Gopinath
HarperCollins Publishers India
380 pages, Rs 499
