Captain Gopinath's new flight plan

Bangalore: The irrepressible Captain Gopinath is at it again. The last time you heard about him in any substantive way was around May of last year, when his express logistics company, Deccan 360, was in a tailspin. That business, while promising, was felled by volatile fuel prices, a weak freight industry, an aggressive growth plan and a business strategy that should have orchestrated tie-ups with freight-heavy retail biggies for its bread and butter.
But, Gorur Ramaswamy Iyengar Gopinath is not someone who sits around moaning about his fate. After all, before he pioneered the low-cost airline business, he was a poultry farmer, a silkworm farmer, a motorcycle dealer, an Udupi hotel owner, a stockbroker, an irrigation equipment dealer, and an agriculture consultant, according to his autobiography, Simply Fly.
Now, he is trying to reinvent the charter business, which ironically, was his first foray into the aviation space, some 15 years ago. While you would normally pick a corporate don such as a Vijay Mallya or a Mukesh Ambani as your target client, Gopinath is, in his familiar style, turning this industry model on its head. His plan is to now bring this sort of charter service to the common man, who will be able to hopscotch across the five major towns in Gujarat for around Rs5,000. “After I started my charter business, I always had this in mind that there is immense potential in connecting emerging tier-III and tier-IV towns. However, Air Deccan happened subsequently and this took a back seat,” says Gopinath.
13/09/12 Raghuvir Singh/Business STandard

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Categories: Deccan Shuttles Sep 2012, Indian Aviation- In General Sep 2012, New Sep 2012