“I worked as the chief flying instructor at the Kerala Aviation Technology Centre (KATC) for 21 years, the longest-serving in that position,” recalls Captain TKR Nair.
He recounts that it was serendipity that won him a government scholarship meant to train pilots. “I was not all that keen. So I was surprised when I got selected. The training under Captain Ramachandran was at the Madras Flying Club in 1956. My first solo flight was on November 12, 1956 in a Tiger Moth,” he says.
Although he was told that he might get a job at the Kerala Flying Club, he was not appointed. In the meantime, his instructor in Madras told him to come to Chennai and he was taken in.
“I worked there some time and then began working with Coimbatore Flying Club for nearly 10 years. Coimbatore was experiencing a boom in those days and many mill owners learnt flying and began buying their own aircraft,” recalls the octogenarian.
- Sheela Sam, then an NCC cadet, remembers being trained as a pilot in 1983 at the KATC when she was all of 17. “We had to go through a couple of tough tests. I passed all those. Initially, it was just another challenge.
- But once I began flying, it became a different experience altogether. Then it was the thrill of flying that motivated me,” she says. At present, an officer with Calicut University, Sheela says she missed a scholarship by a whisker as her mother’s income was deemed to be above the limit by a few hundred Rupees. “I couldn’t afford the fees for private flying lessons. And that was the end of my desire to be a pilot,” she says.
While working there, he recounts his trips for The Hindu to ferry the newspapers in a Dakota to Tiruchi, Madurai and Thiruvananthapuram. “We would take off from Chennai at around 4 am with bundles of the newspaper and our last stop was Thiruvananthapuram before returning to Chennai. I have piloted the plane on several occasions,” he recalls.
While working there, he got a call from Goda Varma Raja who was on the lookout for a pilot from Kerala who would stay on.
“I was not very keen because I had been scalded once due to internal politicking and I was extremely happy in Coimbatore where I had several students. But he would not take no for an answer and that is how I resettled in Thiruvananthapuram in 1968,” says the former pilot.
During his tenure, several men and some women were trained at the Centre, including TKR Nair’s daughter Meenakshi Ramachandran and his son Kailas.
After his retirement in 1989, TKR Nair was appointed as chief flying instructor at Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Udan Academy at Rae Bareli under the directions of the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
“In those days, Indian pilots were much in demand and they would be send by the government to train pilots in Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran,” he adds.