Word: gupta
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Lost luggage. Frustrating delays. Bad food. It's hard to get too excited about flying these days. Hard, that is, unless you've just boarded the Airbus A300 owned by former Indian Airlines engineer B.C. Gupta. Take, for example, the safety demonstration. After asking for a volunteer from the 120 or so kids crammed, some two to a seat, in the plane's economy-class cabin, flight attendant Ridhi Sehgal explains how the oxygen masks work. A plastic deck chair appears and Sehgal helps the volunteer, a worried-looking boy of 7, up onto it so that the other passengers...
...each to join the jet set for a couple hours. India's skies may be busier than ever these days - new airlines, including a raft of budget carriers, have made flying in India more affordable - but even a $20 ticket is too expensive for most Indians. "Flying," says Gupta, "is still beyond the reach of the common...
...Which, as he knows, doesn't mean people can't dream. Born in a small village - "we were not even having a bus" - Gupta got the idea for his enterprise more than 20 years ago, when neighbors begged him for guided tours soon after he landed his job at Indian Airlines. "The people from my village thought I was a very big man and could show them the aircraft," he says. "But due to security I could not." In 2003, he bought a 20-year-old Indian Airlines plane "that had met with a small ground incident," cut it into...
...During the week, Gupta uses the plane to train engineering students and flight attendants. On weekends, under the billing Aeroplanet, it is open to the public and school groups. Poor villagers and students attending government schools can visit for free. "Passengers" check in, receive boarding passes and climb a steep metal staircase to enter the plane. Flight attendants then run them through the safety procedures (schoolchildren get the extended lesson), serve them snacks and cold drinks and answer questions about how an aircraft works. (One pupil recently asked if there was a horn to tell the other planes...
...Chiki E. Gupta ’08, for instance, is weighing offers from an investment bank and a hedge fund. But she says she never touched the “eRecruiting” Web site this fall...