The Flying Factory

As actress Kalki Koechlin lounges around India’s only ultralight aircraft making unit, her father Joel tells us how dreams take flight here. 

What it is is a large shed with windows lining either side. The roof is very high and triangular. As you enter Raj Hamsa—India’s only ultralight/experimental lightsport aircraft-making factory—straight ahead sit two women at a desk, Joel’s secretary and accountant. They chat in Kannada, but speak fluent English too.  

To the left are three glass cabins. The first is empty. Perhaps the manager has gone off for an ice cream. The second has a short Frenchman, Vrata, seated at his desk, working on his PC, motionless except for a hand twitching the mouse. Vrata has a French beard. When he greets you, he smiles, but somehow remains rather serious. 

In the last cabin, which is again glass and is separated from the work areas of the factory by a glass wall, sits Vrata’s father, Joel. He’s 60-ish, grey-haired, and has the physique of an outdoor person. There’s something in his eyes that might be fierce and shy at once. 

There, on his sofa are Kalki, his 26-year-old daughter, and Oriel, his two-year-old son. The little boy is calm. He never smiles, but is really unselfconscious with things and people. He keeps moving about, playing, all the while we’re there. Behind the door is a poster of Jim Morrison. Joel is a fan, I think, of Morrison—and flight.

He moved from France to India in 1971. Ask him why, and he simply says,  “It’s the place for me.” Ask him why he decided to make small planes, and he says, “I can only make a living from what I like to do.”

Isn’t it an unusual business to be in?

“I must be a fool,” he remarks drily.

Raj Hamsa was founded by Joel Koechlin in 1980 in Pondicherry. During the first three years after inception, with the moral and financial support of JRD Tata, pioneer of early Indian aviation, Joel made free flight hang-gliders and organised training camps in the Nilgiri hills. 

The factory in Whitefield, Bangalore, was set up in 1993 to design and make three-axis conventional control microlight aircraft. The range is called X-Air, and includes one and two-seater crafts, hang-gliders and powered hang-gliders. Flying factories like Raj Hamsa exist only in Europe, Canada, the US and in some countries of the erstwhile USSR. In short, they’re a rare thing, as unique as your own little plane, if you could have one.

Joel’s team designs them from scratch, using mostly indigenous materials. “In India, people still think that technical know-how has to be imported,” he says.  “At Raj Hamsa, it’s in fact the contrary: conception and design of the entire X-Air range of aircraft is done here, by us.” Most of what they make is exported. About 1,300 X-Airs are flying today, 60 of them over India. 

We go through the glass door into the large high-roofed shed. The glass door and window frames are all painted green. The walls are off-white. It’s rough, but very interesting inside. There are five half-complete planes in this forward space. A green two-seater X-Air F Gumnam, two white X-Air Hanumans, and two powered hang-gliders, one an ‘antique’ museum piece (Joel’s first plane, 1983). 

One of the planes made of fibre-glass, Kalki says, is more expensive because customers these days want their planes to look and be expensive, and they want them in muted silver or white tones. They want an aeroplane to look like a serious aeroplane, and not like a toy. Whereas, all these years, Joel would make bright green, yellow, red and white, and blue planes for customers. Perhaps the days of wild adventure are past.

“I first tried to fly when I was six,” reminisces Joel, fondly, “I wore on cardboard wings and jumped off the cupboard. After busting my nose, I decided to do it more scientifically.” 

At the rear of the shed is a half floor. You go up by a small winding wrought-iron staircase to a wooden floor space where the wings and tail of the planes are traced out. There are variously-shaped stencils in plastic transluscent paper on the floor and hung on a rack against the wall. Rolls of bright-coloured fabric and two sewing machines are set into the floor. The windows lining this open upper storey let in sunlight in soft puddles. Here on one wall, partly hidden by pink and purple parachute fabric, is a tiny framed picture of someone in a glider, flying in the sky.

Joel and Kalki say that you’ll never find completed planes in this factory. They are readied, then dismantled and packed, and then shipped off to where they’ve been ordered from. The new owner, often along with his wife and kids, will take a month to assemble the plane. In Africa, this little plane is used to spray pesticide over fields. Indian customers include the Indian Armed Forces, who use the crafts for adventure sports. Mostly, they are used for hobby flying, but in the last five to seven years, there have been virtually no civilians flying small planes in India. The few proud ones left are usually sons of politicians or wealthy magnates. 

This is the only ultralight aircraft unit in India, and business is down. Among the reasons for this are government restrictions on airspace (given the perceived security threat) and the high price of aviation fuel. Until a few years ago, an ordinary person could fly. For example, young people who were members of the National Cadet Corps (NCC) would learn to fly powered small planes.   

“Governments are so paranoid about the terror threat that they hardly allow adventure flying anymore. They’re clamping down on freedom,” Joel says bitterly. “It’s not like the 9/11 terrorists crashed into the Twin Towers in a two-seater aircraft!”

So Raj Hamsa is getting fewer orders for these colourful little planes (priced between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 20 lakh) that must surely be sheer fun to fly. I imagine going up out there whenever I like in a little two-seater if I want company or in a single-seater when I’d like it to be just the wind and me.

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