“It’s a very regulated industry, and it’s not been growing at the pace it should be,” says Tekriwal, “we’ve formed industry coalitions to tackle some of the issues.” The current Minister of Civil Aviation, Ashok Gajapathi Raju, has tax and financial planning expertise, but no aviation experience at all. This is a problem perhaps due to India’s tendency to promote politicians with no industry experience to top positions. She expects India to become one of the largest private aviation markets in the world in the next 10 years, as does aviation analyst Fabrizio Poli.īut the country does need to sort out some of its bureaucratic ways before progress can be made – unlike anywhere else in the world every single detail within the aviation industry must be approved on paper.
“More than a luxury they’re a necessity,” says Tekriwal, putting current client jet usage numbers at 60 percent necessity and 40 percent luxury, “but with the kind of new wealth coming in, the private jet industry will turn into a luxury in India.” There are enough politicians and industrialists, short on time, who need to visit often remote, disconnected areas – to rally up constituencies on their own dime, or check on their factories, and a private jet flight is the only option. The results have not yet been released publicly. To indicate just how nascent the industry is, the Government of India released a call for tenders from consultants to create a comprehensive record of India’s airstrips, in 2012. India has over 200 fully functional airstrips, but only 80 are connected by commercial airlines.
“You can’t mess around with these customers,” she says. With the cost of a private jet flight from Delhi to Mumbai and back at about $23,000, there are fewer takers. “Now was the time,” she says, “it was a broken and fragmented market, we had to test it extensively and found a surprising number of people were willing to pay for the service.” Starting out in 2012 as a consultancy to assist strategy and marketing for private jet owners and those looking to sell aircraft, Tekriwal says she wanted to make sure she fully understood the problems being faced by the industry before stepping into the fray. With a clean bill of health a year on from hearing relatives mourn her lack of marriageability as a result of chemotherapy and several surgeries, she packed her bags and left her native Bhopal for New Delhi. an MBA, and a role with aerospace and aviation innovation consultants, Aerospace Resources, she returned to India to apply her expertise.Ĭancer at age 21 was a minor hurdle, Tekriwal says. Her parents against her wish to become a pilot, in India often considered a profession not meant for the girls, Tekriwal instead went and interned with an aviation company in Mumbai during college.Īfter a stint in the U.K. Tekriwal has been working in the aviation sector for over a decade - since she was just 17. Figures that make JetSetGo’s ascent even more interesting. The number of business aviation aircraft is expected to jump from 680 to 2000 by 2020. According to global market insight specialists Frost and Sullivan, India has 12 percent of the global market share in private jet ownership – with around 140 private jets owned in the country versus China’s 93 and Japan’s 76.
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