How to get a billion passengers to fly in India

Mr Fareed Sheikh played it cool. The 25-year-old was determined not to let anyone on the airport bus catch on that he was about to take his first-ever flight.

A production executive in a dosa batter-making company in Bengaluru city, Karnataka state, he had saved up since October 2025 to take this quick vacation home, 900km away in Parbhani city, Maharashtra state.

“It’s my first job, and I won’t get many days off to take 22-hour train rides both ways. A flight saves time,” he told The Straits Times.

Mr Fareed was taking a 90-minute Star Air flight from Bengaluru to Nanded, a small town with a new flight connection. From there, it would be an hour’s rail journey to Parbhani.

“Now that I am taking my first flight, I believe there will be many more,” he said.

That is what the government and airlines in India are banking on.

Only an estimated 3 per cent to 5 per cent of Indians have ever flown on an airplane – most of them from the expanding middle class.

The total number of journeys people made in and through India by air exceeded 350 million in 2024. Of these, more than 220 million were domestic journeys.

But this is just the start. The Indian Ministry of Civil Aviation expects passenger traffic to hit 1.1 billion by 2047.

India has the fastest-growing aviation sector in the world – passenger traffic has grown 12 per cent annually in the past decade.

To try to keep up, the number of airports in the country has grown from 74 to 164 in the past decade.

“The Indian government has big ambitions to create hubs in the north, south, east and west for people travelling into India. It’s a game plan that is actually achievable because of the huge traffic potential. India has been punching below its weight till now,” said Mr Subhas Menon, director-general of the Association of Asia Pacific Airlines.

India is already the world’s third-largest aviation market. But its aircraft fleet size is only 850, compared with the United States and China, which have around 10,000 and 4,500 aircraft in their respective commercial passenger fleets.

The nation has only seven airlines today, with IndiGo and Air India alone running 85 per cent of all flights. The US has 19 major airlines and China has over 67.

Indian aviation still has a lot of catching up to do

To record passenger traffic figures of one billion, India needs more of everything – airlines, aircraft, airports and pilots.

India is investing heavily in civil aviation as a faster travel option than rail and road, but it’s been a turbulent time for the sector. The Air India plane crash in June 2025 and nationwide flight cancellations in December from IndiGo’s inadequate pilot rostering have dented the sector’s image and exposed shortcomings.

So despite the growth potential, a key question is: Can India’s aviation sector grow safely, quickly and sustainably to meet demand?

The sector has long been under capacity, Mr Menon said. It is finally expanding to meet growing demand for flights from 432 million middle-class Indians earning US$6,700 (S$8,500) to US$40,000 a year.

But the expansion won’t be straightforward.

India in 2025 recorded 4.13 billion visits by domestic tourists, which airlines consider a sizeable source of customers. Foreign tourist arrivals were just 9.02 million.

The country has placed the world’s biggest order for aircraft – about 1,500 – but these will take years to be delivered amid global supply chain constraints.

Three new airlines have been granted approvals, and the existing seven are expanding their web of routes. But given the enormous initial capital requirements, a protracted wait for imported aircraft and parts, and high taxes on fuel, long-term financial viability is a persistent question for airlines.

The Indian government is offering subsidies for regional connectivity and is on an airport-building spree, but not every project has taken off. Indian airlines seem to have a pilot shortage, yet it takes cadet pilots more than a year after getting a licence to find a job. Around 2,000 licence-holding pilots are currently unemployed.

Add to this a thicket of regulations that make expansion costlier and slower.

But the most Indian problem of all is pricing: Airlines struggle to square the rising cost of flying with the low airfares that price-conscious passengers want.

On the IndiGo flight ST took from Bengaluru to Hyderabad in January were eight dairy sellers from Hubli, all dressed up in cowboy hats and sunglasses. They were determined not to fall asleep during the 6am flight to “enjoy every minute of the experience”.

But they were taking a train back – an air-conditioned railway seat costs only a quarter of the price of an air ticket.

Still, the enthusiasm for flying is the bright spot Indian aviation is focused on.

The past decade’s airport expansion has already succeeded in building connections – even to places some have never heard of.

“Where is Nanded? Why are all these people going to Nanded?” asked a passer-by in the Bengaluru international airport as he heard the gate staff announcing the final call for departures.

Among the passengers headed to the tiny town in Maharashtra were former air force employee Jasmine Kaur and her pilot husband Ramesh K. It was the frequent fliers’ first flight to Nanded.

The tiny town in Maharashtra is best known for Takht Sachkhand Sri Hazur Abchalnagar Sahib, a beautiful Sikh gurdwara. Nanded’s airport was opened in 2008, in time for a significant religious event that drew thousands of Sikh pilgrims, but languished after two airlines ceased operations there during the Covid-19 pandemic, until Star Air began flights there in 2023.

A free shuttle bus service runs between the airport and the gurdwara, timed to coincide with Star Air flights from Delhi, Jalandhar and Bengaluru.

By the time Mrs Kaur hopped off the bus at the pilgrim guest house, she had searched online for where else Star Air goes.

“Flights are now going to small towns we never imagined we could fly to,” said Mrs Kaur, 54.

India operates only 0.11 airports per million people, significantly lower than the US (47.35) and China (0.39).

The government hopes to democratise flying and jump-start regional connectivity in emerging cities and small towns under its UDAN scheme. UDAN, which means “flight” in Hindi, stands for Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik – “may the common citizen fly”.

Launched in 2016, the scheme aims to develop 200 operational civilian airports in India by 2030, and encourages airlines to operate new routes to unserved and underserved areas through “viability gap funding”. This includes airfare subsidies for one to three years, such as for Star Air’s flights to Nanded and 30 other destinations.

As at October 2025, the UDAN scheme had operationalised 649 routes and 93 airports. The state-subsidised infrastructure is in addition to commercial ventures in busy metros like the Adani Group’s lotus-shaped Navi Mumbai International Airport, which opened on Christmas Day in 2025, and Bengaluru’s garden-like international terminal that opened in 2022.

In the Airports Authority of India’s (AAI) headquarters in Delhi, a senior official’s phone rang incessantly.

“Give me five lines on Jhansi’s feasibility now!” the official barked, typing furiously to send a report to a colleague in a meeting at the Prime Minister’s office.

Fifteen minutes later, the same official was preparing a response for another possible airport, this time in Kashmir.

“The Prime Minister wants 200 airports, so we are always running like this!” the official said.

At the Wings India aviation expo in Hyderabad from Jan 28 to 30, Mr Sujoy Dey, airport master planner and an executive director at AAI, met a flood of excited state leaders and bureaucrats from across the country recommending their districts or towns for airports.

“Every state wants new airports. But we pick the locations based on pre-feasibility studies, calculating distance from other airports, highways, population, per-capita income and willingness of the locals to travel,” Mr Dey said.

Some airports have been runaway hits.

Take, for instance, Purnia in Bihar state, a 340 million rupee (S$4.7 million) project with a single runway and nondescript passenger terminal that began operations in September 2025. By Jan 31, it had already recorded 100,000 passengers.

Hindon Airport, in the Uttar Pradesh city of Ghaziabad just 30km outside the national capital, was envisioned as Delhi’s second airport, but once seemed like a dud. Star Air was the first to operate flights there in 2019, but with no last-mile connectivity by ride-hailing services like Uber, the flights saw few takers.

Before giving up, Star Air made a last-ditch effort “to promote the place”, said the airline’s chief executive, Captain Simran Singh Tiwana. It roped in taxi and auto-rickshaw associations to take passengers to the nearest metro station with trains to Delhi, at fixed rates. For a few months, the airline also advertised how convenient Hindon’s location was – 53 minutes to Connaught Place in central Delhi, 55 minutes from Meerut city in Uttar Pradesh.

It worked. And when passengers chose Hindon, so did other airlines. The airport now handles five to 12 flights every day by IndiGo, Air India Express and Star Air, to places ranging from Chennai and Goa to Bathinda and Kishangarh.

At least 15 airports, however, have failed because of the lack of promotion, low demand, shoddy construction, airline disinterest or poor visibility owing to bad weather and the lack of instrument landing systems at smaller airports.

“Airports are often prestige projects for politicians, and as a government body, we are forced to comply even if there are feasibility concerns,” said another AAI official, describing how election-bound states tended to become prime locations for airports.

Even if some airports prove unviable, the AAI must still maintain them at an annual cost of 1.4 million to 20 million rupees per white elephant.

Some non-operational airports, like in Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh state and Kalaburagi in Karnataka state, have now been leased out for flight training.

Of 93 airports built and enhanced under the UDAN scheme, 15 are non-operational today.

To attract more international fliers, Mr Menon said India must think about creating multiple aviation hubs beyond Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi and Mumbai where international traffic is now concentrated. Like in Europe, feeder routes from small towns must connect passengers to several major sectors which, in turn, have international connections.

“You come out of a domestic terminal and have to take a taxi to the international terminal – you can’t build a hub like this. When airports are built, you have to consider what will facilitate seamless travel,” Mr Menon added.

The senior AAI official sending off reports said that “while airport infrastructure is on track with demand, it is the airlines and aircraft that need to catch up now to create the traffic that we have envisioned”.

Despite the size of India’s market, options can seem limited when booking a flight.

IndiGo and Air India, including the latter’s low-cost arm Air India Express, together operate nine out of 10 domestic flights, with the remainder split among SpiceJet, Akasa Air, Star Air, Alliance Air and Fly91.

Big players make up 85% of flights

Smaller airlines fill regional gaps

The effective duopoly in India today has emerged from a consolidation of an industry where only the most well-capitalised players have survived.

Airline executives and aviation analysts say that running an airline in India is riskier and trickier than in other parts of the world. They cite the tight tapestry of suffocating regulations, high entry barriers, inadequate institutional financing and exorbitant fuel prices worsened by taxes.

Aviation fuel accounts for 45 per cent to 50 per cent of airfares in India – well above the global average of 30 per cent – because of duties and state taxes that can exceed 40 per cent.

Global incidents like the Covid-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war and the US-Israeli conflict with Iran affect airlines the world over, but have been especially turbulent for India. The rupee was Asia’s worst-performing currency in 2025 against the dollar, increasing operating costs in a sector that must pay for planes, leases, spare parts and fuel in US dollars.

In the best of times, airline margins are razor-thin at around 3 per cent to 4 per cent, he added.

The industry is also stuck in a bureaucratic morass despite recent e-governance improvements.

A senior executive of a now-defunct low-cost carrier surmised: “Excessive control by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), hundreds of documents for compliance and delays at every stage of approval are huge entry barriers for airlines and flight training organisations.”

Air India CEO Campbell Wilson noted: “The regulation supports the industry and puts safety first and foremost, but we also need to be competitive with other airlines around the world, and that needs regulation to evolve to keep pace with (contemporary) requirements.”

Once a vibrant, fiercely competitive sector, Indian aviation in the past decade became a graveyard of at least 15 collapsed airlines, including Kingfisher, Jet Airways, Air Sahara, AirAsia India and Go First.

But with the less efficient and weaker players gone, there is more coordination and stability in the market today, explained Mr Joshua Ng, director of Asia-Pacific at Alton Aviation Consultancy in Singapore.

“IndiGo has been profitable for years. So, the takeaway is not that you cannot make money in Indian aviation. It is that you need to run your airline very efficiently,” he said.

IndiGo has been at the centre of the expansion in Indian aviation, with its market share in the country nearly doubling from 32 per cent to 63 per cent in the past decade. It reported a net profit margin of 9 per cent for the year ending March 2025.

As disposable incomes grow in the emerging middle class and air connectivity improves across the vast geography of India, Indians are flying more, studies show. Projections indicate that by 2030, Indians will rank as the fourth-highest global spenders on travel.

“The common trajectory of aviation in any country has been that as the middle class grows and gets wealthier, it becomes less price sensitive. People shift from low-cost carriers to full-service carriers, they travel greater distances, go from domestic to international destinations – that was China’s model of expansion,” Mr Ng said.

“India is in its growth phase now, but its trajectory may be different. The upward mobility of passengers could be reflected in how they travel and the luxuries they choose, rather than where they go,” he added.

Although India’s greater gross domestic product (GDP) per capita means more people can afford to travel, the country still has severe income inequality, with the majority of the nation’s wealth concentrated in the hands of the top 5 per cent.

So airlines there must woo a range of passengers – those who can afford only basic no-frills flights, those who might pay 500 rupees extra for wider seats but will pack their dinner instead of buying an overpriced sandwich on board, corporate travellers who pay higher fares and opt for all add-ons to fly during peak hours, and the rich who opt for business class without batting an eyelid.

Number of days the average worker in these places needed to work to afford a plane ticket in 2023

Having launched in 2006 as an entirely low-cost carrier, IndiGo has gradually moved to a hybrid model, Mr Ng said, with a business class. It has moved from charging for meals and XL seats to offering special services like Indigo UpFront for passengers who want extra baggage, free seat selection and flexible date changes. It also recently launched a tiered Blue Chip loyalty programme.

India ranks among the top three fastest-growing outbound tourism markets, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. And IndiGo’s international expansion has kept pace.

Going international with a Dubai route in 2011, it now covers 45 global destinations, overtaking Air India this past winter as India’s top international carrier with a market share of 21.1 per cent in foreign flights.

IndiGo is one of the fastest-growing carriers in the world today, with a fleet size of 400 and 2,200 daily flights at around 85 per cent capacity. With an order of 900 aircraft, it says it will add one aircraft a week over the next decade.

But being the dominant airline has its pitfalls. IndiGo has been growing rapidly without a matching increase in pilots, analysts said. And the Federation of Indian Pilots accused the airline of “inexplicably” freezing recruitment during the two-year window it had to implement the DGCA’s new rules limiting pilots’ duty hours and requiring longer rest periods to reduce fatigue.

Because of faulty rostering and unavailability of pilots, in December 2025 IndiGo cancelled and delayed more than 4,500 flights in 10 days. This had a cascading effect of soaring prices and disruptions nationwide.

“IndiGo is so big that when it sneezed, the whole country caught a cold,” said aviation analyst Hemanth D.P., CEO of Hyderabad-based Asia Pacific Flight Training Academy.

IndiGo’s main competitor, Air India, is taking a different course.

It faces the twin challenges of growing fast enough to meet demand while modernising an unprofitable, sclerotic airline. The 93-year-old national carrier that was state-owned for 70 years was acquired by the Tata Group in January 2022, with Singapore Airlines taking a 25 per cent stake in November 2024.

Having inherited an airline that had been deteriorating for years without investment – a third of the fleet was cannibalised for spare parts, IT systems were outdated and it was notorious for broken seats – Air India’s new owners launched a massive five-year internal transformation programme.

Today, the airline is neck-deep in a full makeover that it hopes will change its fortunes by pushing its market share domestically from 28 per cent to 30 per cent and doubling its international market share.

But rather than chasing “market share at any cost”, CEO Wilson said the airline is aiming to first build world-class services, a reliable reputation and relevance to a range of customers, and to turn a profit.

It has hired 14,000 people in the past four years, onboarding younger staff free of the apathy that Air India passengers have often griped about.

On a blistering Thursday in February at the airline’s sprawling new training academy in Gurgaon city, technicians were installing the country’s first full-motion cabin evacuation trainer. It can recreate the turbulent conditions when an aircraft drops by up to 5,000 feet, to train the crew who had till then received such emergency training only in static conditions. Behind the trainer, an inflated raft and swimming pool stood ready for a water evacuation drill.

In the adjacent buildings, pilots were going through type rating sessions in 21 full-flight simulators set up by Airbus and Boeing exclusively with Air India in the country. Type rating involves training needed to fly different aircraft models.

In other classrooms in the academy, uniformed crew practised everything from putting out in-cabin fires to pouring fine wine for first-class passengers.

The airline is also setting up a flight training school in Amravati in Maharashtra state and an in-house maintenance, repair and overhaul unit in Bengaluru, where it will also train engineers.

Air India is spending billions on this infrastructure because the constant churn of undercapitalised and sub-scale airlines in India and the paucity of investment in Air India itself had left the country without a strong ecosystem of high-standard flight schools, aircraft maintenance facilities and trained engineers, Mr Wilson said.

“If we were to try and do this turnaround in Europe, North America or Australasia, we would have a very mature and established support ecosystem we could draw from. We wouldn't actually need to be doing some of the things that we’re doing here.”

A massive fleet expansion is also under way, with an order for 600 aircraft at a list price of US$80 billion, of which 572 are yet to arrive. The airline is also retrofitting its existing fleet of 200 aircraft with new seats, carpets and lavatories.

“We see such a huge opportunity in India, and we want to be the ones to seize it,” Mr Wilson said.

It is no easy task.

“The post-Covid supply chain crunch of aircraft, seats and engine parts is the most frustrating thing delaying our transformation,” said Mr Wilson.

The June 2025 crash of a London-bound Air India flight that killed 240 passengers and crew also hollowed out public trust. The DGCA has not released its investigation report on the cause of the crash, but its interim report in December suggested pilot error, which pilot welfare bodies have disputed.

“We are awaiting the final report to see if there are any recommendations that apply to any of the stakeholders,” said Mr Wilson.

Despite the crash, the airline’s upgrades that are under way have met with early success. From a score of minus 19 in December 2023, Air India’s customer satisfaction has climbed to a range of 30 to 60 in 2025, with the higher ratings for retrofitted aircraft.

As ST’s Uber drove into Star Air’s office in the aerospace park near the Bengaluru airport, the 27-year-old driver recognised the logo. A cousin from his home town of Vijaynagar had taken one of the airline’s flights the previous week to attend a crucial job interview in Bengaluru, instead of taking a six-hour bus ride.

This is exactly “the problem we wanted to solve”, said Capt Tiwana, Star Air’s CEO.

“Sixty-three per cent of India’s population resides in smaller towns – that’s just short of one billion people. They should have access to global markets, to the opportunities in bigger towns, and industries there should be able to invite international delegations to their places,” he told ST.

Star Air, established in 2019 with the explicit goal of connecting smaller cities and towns, is the country’s longest-serving regional airline. It flies to 30 destinations, including heritage towns as diverse as Hampi and Ajmer, and manufacturing hubs like Jalandhar, Jamnagar and Kolhapur.

The airline picks routes connecting places that are hard to reach even by rail or road, and whose nodes have customers with disposable income.

Star Air has tapped UDAN’s viability gap funding for its expansion, but Capt Tiwana admitted that it has had to suspend services at some airports owing to poor demand.

As the first airline to fly to many smaller airports, Star Air has also worked with the AAI, DGCA and states to operationalise airports and put in place instrument landing systems and last-mile connectivity, “all of which increase operational reliability”.

Another Indian airline with a proudly specific mission is the two-year-old Fly91.

From its Goa and Hyderabad hubs, it services prosperous small towns like Sindhudurg, Jalgaon, and Agatti in the Lakshadweep islands that only 70-seater turboprop ATR 72-600s can reach.

Fly91’s founder Manoj Chacko called it a “pure-play regional operation” that the airline developed after studying the mistakes of 24 failed global airlines.

To run a successful airline, Mr Chacko said, “you need to be mindful of the economics of aviation, sweat your assets and have a maintenance programme that can support the high utilisation of aircraft”.

India’s Civil Aviation Minister Kinjarapu Ram Mohan Naidu said in Parliament on Dec 8, 2025, that the country has the demand to sustain “five big airlines”, and that this is the “best time to start an airline in India”.

Even so, airlines are navigating a litany of global uncertainties, including volatile US tariffs, wars, the US crackdown on work visas, climate change vulnerabilities and skyrocketing fuel prices – or what Mr Wilson called “lightning strike after lightning strike”.

But the foremost obstacle for airline expansion is the global delay in delivery of aircraft, engines and components, Mr Menon said.

India now accounts for just 2 per cent of the world’s aircraft supply chain and has no domestic commercial aircraft manufacturing. So, although Airbus, Boeing, Embraer and United Aircraft Corp have all announced plans to assemble aircraft or cultivate suppliers in India, airlines will have to continue to import aircraft for years.

Limited aircraft availability has also elevated lease rentals globally. Around 80 per cent of India’s commercial fleet is leased, but the aircraft financing and leasing industry is small-scale in the country. Airlines thus rely on the deep pockets of their promoters, government funding or global lessors and financiers concentrated in Singapore and Ireland.

Indian banks have been reluctant to finance aircraft purchases because of the history of airline failures and loan defaults, said Mr Timothy Ross, head of investor relations at Singapore-based BOC Aviation, which has leased aircraft to most major airlines in India in the past decade.

Concurring, Mr Hemanth said: “The government must make aviation a priority sector for lending.”

Recognising the gap, the Indian government in 2024 kick-started a domestic aircraft leasing and financing ecosystem, primarily through the International Financial Services Centres Authority. It offers tax holidays, duty exemptions and regulatory support to reduce reliance on foreign lessors.

Mr Ng said India’s aviation policies “must encourage airlines to freely set up – but only with sustainable models for a credible path to success”. If a lot of airlines fail, he added, it would do a disservice to the country’s aviation sector, discourage banks from lending and erode passenger trust.

As aircraft manufacturers settle their long waiting lists for existing airlines, start-ups are likely to rank low on their priorities, said analysts. Moreover, if an airline places an order for new aircraft today, it cannot expect delivery before 2032.

Mr Ross said that although BOC has leased aircraft to new airlines like Kingfisher in the past, given the sectoral risks, it would avoid start-up airlines today. Kingfisher Airline, whose flamboyant beer baron founder promoted “five-star flying”, collapsed after seven years with some 60 billion rupees in debt.

Mr Shravan Kumar Vishwakarma is not daunted by the industry’s bumpy history. The 35-year-old founder of Shankh Air is so optimistic that any mention of challenges or failed airlines in India infuriates him.

“Airlines are not luxury or elite services. They are simply a way to get from one place to another. A lean business with good ideas can succeed,” snapped Mr Vishwakarma.

ST met him in Shankh Air’s partially finished but plush office in Lucknow. In the waiting lounge, a receptionist began the day with Krishna bhajans – devotional songs – before turning on, with no sense of irony, a Hollywood plane crash movie.

Shankh Air received its approval in September 2024, but the airline came to public attention only when the Civil Aviation Minister mentioned it in December 2025, along with two others, as upcoming airline start-ups.

A high school graduate, Mr Vishwakarma was raised in Kanpur city in Uttar Pradesh by an iron-worker father and homemaker mother. From driving mini-trucks for a living, Mr Vishwakarma made his fortune in the past six years by starting his own 700-strong truck fleet, and then a stone mining, cement and iron trading company. His businesses have bank loans totalling five billion rupees, but “it’s not a crime until I don’t repay it”.

Mr Vishwakarma, who took his first flight in 2012, told ST that his modest background has given him insights into an ordinary Indian customer’s spending behaviour that founders with generational wealth would never have.

Shankh Air will be a full-service, scheduled airline, with Lucknow and Delhi as its hubs and connections to the major metro cities. By 2028, it will go international, beginning with the popular Gulf routes, then Singapore.

The start-up has purchased three Airbus A320 aircraft from a Bulgarian airline and plans to launch its first flight in April or May 2026. Named for the conch Mr Vishwakarma’s father often blew during Hindu home rituals, Shankh Air hopes to go far, like the sonorous sound of the conch.

In five years, Shankh Air will be “on top or closed down”, Mr Vishwakarma said bluntly.

Meanwhile, alhind, a 30-year-old travel company in Kochi, Kerala, that also has airline approval, is taking a more cautious approach. It will start as a regional airline for south India by leasing five to seven narrow-body ATR 72-600 aircraft that can seat about 70 people, the company told ST.

“As flights become more affordable in India, there are more employment opportunities. Aspiring pilots are emerging from across the country,” said Capt Anil Rao, general secretary of the Airline Pilots’ Association of India.

Today, India has about 24,008 licensed pilots under 65 years old, but the DGCA does not keep information on how many are employed.

Domestic airlines now employ around 12,000 pilots, including about 230 foreign nationals, for a fleet of 834 aircraft.

In the next decade, they will require some 25,000 additional pilots to fly the 1,500 aircraft that will join the collective fleet.

Pilots at present tend to be overworked, as Indian airlines operate on tight budgets and expand rapidly, analysts told ST. The DGCA’s recent regulations to enhance airline safety mandate more rest time and fewer night landings for pilots. Compliance will mean hiring more pilots.

The current ecosystem of 40 flying training organisations operating in 68 bases is not enough to meet this demand, Civil Aviation Minister Naidu acknowledged at an industry meeting in November 2025.

But there is no dearth of applicants for pilot training, as more middle-class families are willing to pay the fees of five million to 10 million rupees for what is increasingly seen as an accessible, lucrative career.

At Kalaburagi airport in Karnataka, pilot trainee Abez Khan steadied his Diamond DA40-D single-engine propeller plane as it quivered in the wind. Landing it smoothly, he stepped out of the aircraft and pulled off his aviators, Top Gun-style, relishing the walk from the runway to the hangar after his 37th hour flying solo cross-country.

In a few more months, after Mr Khan, 27, completes 200 hours of flying, including solo and night sessions, he will have a commercial pilot’s licence.

Flight schools like the Asia Pacific Flight Training Academy have trainees from all over India, especially non-cities. An increasing proportion of them are women. Students have taken education loans, and some said their parents have sold their house or farmland to pay for flight school.

But it’s not a straight path from flight school to cockpit.

Analysts said that more than 2,000 pilots are not currently flying, as some airlines have temporarily cut back on hiring.

Mr Hemanth said some pilots may be unemployed because of “capability issues”, and though “hiring of pilots had recently slowed down because of delayed aircraft delivery, it is on the uptick as airlines expand”.

Capt Rao noted with pride: “India has some of the world’s safest pilots, and also the highest number of women pilots in the world.” Approximately 15 per cent of all pilots in Indian airlines are women, triple the global average of about 5 per cent.

Ms Aditi Maheshwari, 23, from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, cannot drive a car but is already learning to fly. She has been on an airplane only once as a passenger – when she flew from Delhi to join the Asia Pacific Flight Training Academy.

After going through 12th grade in school, Ms Maheshwari was bitten by wanderlust and asked her father, a wholesale grocery seller, if she could pursue a career as a cabin crew member to travel the world.

“Papa asked me to ‘think higher’ and asked why I can’t train to be a pilot instead,” she said.

“Airlines may not be hiring many pilots now, but a lot of jobs are coming soon. By the time I get my licence, there will be lots of airports, flights, passengers, jobs and good salaries,” said Ms Maheshwari, her sunny outlook shining bright on India’s aviation sector.