No passengers at all on the first flight. One man, one single-engined de Havilland Puss Moth, and a bag of post off the Imperial Airways run down from London — about twenty-five kilos of it, as I understand it. J. R. D. Tata took off from Karachi at first light, which is the right hour for mail and the wrong hour for anybody who likes breakfast.
He put down at Ahmedabad to refuel, then on to Juhu, which in 1932 was a strip of mud flat that spent a good part of the year underwater. The mail didn't stop there either. Nevill Vintcent, his partner in the thing and an old Royal Air Force hand, carried it onward towards Madras the same day. Two pilots, one aeroplane each, a single sack of letters between them, and that was the whole airline — no reservations desk, no cabin crew, nobody to apologise to if the wind was against you.
I like that it started as a timetable obligation rather than an adventure. Letters have to arrive. Somebody at Karachi weighed that bag and signed for it, somebody at Juhu was standing out on the flats waiting to take it off him, and the clock was the only thing anyone was arguing with. Ninety-odd destinations now fly under the name it grew into. Still a mail run at heart, if you squint.
Ahmedabad's the sensible place to break it — roughly 500 km out of Karachi, about as far as you'd want a single engine to go over that ground. And the monsoon wrote the timetable: Juhu went under for months, so the mail shifted inland to Poona until the flats dried out. Harold, somebody had to work out the drying dates before anyone worked out the fares.
Harold, the licence he was flying on was number one. Not a figure of speech — India issued pilot's licences and his was the first off the pile (he'd passed the test three years earlier, aged twenty-four). Nice to be the whole airline and the top of the register at once.