An Angel in the Cockpit

It began with a photograph in a magazine of an odd little aircraft that looked as though it had an upside-down tail. When Vijaypat Singhania, chairman of Raymond, leading industrialist and a respected pillar of society, saw the picture, it inspired him to take off on an adventure that could only end in disaster, if it didn’t end in glory. For, like his hero, JRD Tata, Singhania had a passion for flying, and the aircraft he saw was a Shadow microlight – a twin-seater aircraft with a two-stroke engine akin to a motobike’s. An aircraft so small that, in his own words, sitting in it ‘felt less like being in an aircraft than wearing one’! In this tiny vehicle, Singhania flew 5000 miles from England to India, in 22 days – from 18 August to 8 September, 1988. In doing so, he broke the existing record of 34 days over the same distance, set the previous year by a British pilot, Brian Milton, and earned himself a place in the Guinness Book of World Records. As he prepares to set yet another record – by flying to over 70,000 feet in a hot-air balloon in November 2005 – Vijaypat Singhania recounts his adventures both hair-raising and hilarious, as he fights his fear of sharks, finds himself on a nudist beach in Iraklion, encounters Greek beauties in Milos and tough-talking Pathans in Gwadar – with only an angel and three gods for company.