Jeh: Simple living, high flying

Mumbai, July 11: GoAir ? Jeh Wadia?s start-up airline ? will sign up for 50 new aircraft by December, making it the second biggest order by an Indian civil aviation company.

The newest airline to take to the Indian skies will initially start with two leased Airbus A-320s when it takes off in October and plans to add more planes in November.

GoAir?s order for 50 planes will be dwarfed only by Rakesh Gangwal?s IndiGo, which recently committed to buy 100 A-320 airplanes from Airbus Industrie.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Jeh Wadia, managing director of GoAir, spoke of his plans to ?commoditise air travel? and ?fulfil people?s dreams?.

GoAir will initially focus on the west and south India before launching its operations in the north.

?I myself cannot fulfil my dreams because of a lack of connectivity to faraway towns,? said the young scion of Nusli Wadia, whose flagship company Bombay Dyeing is mainly into textiles. Jeh said he had conceptualised GoAir in early 2000-01, but was stymied by the controls in the civil aviation sector.

The airline venture will initially be bankrolled by the Wadia family. Later, as it makes its big investments in airplanes, the company will consider raising capital from venture capital firms or come out with an initial public offering.

GoAir will have all the attributes of a low-cost airline. It is modelled on RyanAir. Jeh is eyeing the people who travel in trains and Volvo buses as his potential customers.

Around 19 million people travel by air in India every year, while 15 million travel by trains every day.

The Wadia scion says he draws inspiration from his father Nusli and Nanaji Deshmukh, the RSS worker who is now into social work in Chitrakoot in Uttar Pradesh where Jeh spends quality time almost every month.

?There are many reasons why we cannot travel frequently and do things that we would love to do. It could be the pricing issue, or a lack of connectivity and could also be due to employers denying enough days to go on holidays as train travel takes up time,? said Jeh who works out of a new office in the Bombay Dyeing premises.

In his teens, Jeh had started an imported car dealership outfit because he wanted to drive the latest fast cars and his father Nusli would have nothing of it, asking him to support such a dream by himself. ?So, I used to import cars and drive them for a while and then sell them,? he adds.

A Warwick University alumni, Jeh (31) says he is not a serial entrepreneur though he has had many new ventures to his credit.

In the late nineties, he had spawned a venture capital fund that incubated new dotcom ventures. The fund had investors like media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Ratan Tata, chairman of the Tata group.