All that little Augustine dreamt of were airplanes―flying them high in the sky, soaring over the clouds. He lived near an airport, and he knew a way to get past its fence and the security guards. Often, he would wait until it was dark, and hide near the runway. He felt a thrill every time he saw a plane approach, its lights shining brightly and its engine roaring, and his body would shake with the loud noise and the rumbling. He would imagine himself in the cockpit, steering the bird to its destination.
The more he watched them, the more he wanted to fly them. In fact, he wanted to make them. The small-town boy did not know how he was going to. But he never stopped dreaming.
And then a door opened. “I had the opportunity to join the National Cadet Corps,” says Captain Augustine Joseph on a video call from California. The little boy from Thiruvananthapuram is now the proud owner of the American high-performance aircraft manufacturer Lancair Aerospace International. It sells in 34 countries and has manufactured some 2,400 airplanes.
“You get one or two flights in the NCC, and the interest kept growing,” says Joseph, 56. He could have joined the flying club in Thiruvananthapuram, but he was not keen on flying the low-performance planes they had. “My interest was to fly those powerful jets,” he says. “And I found out that if I joined the Air Force, I could fly big jets and fighter jets.”
After clearing most tests for admission to the National Defence Academy, he ran into an unexpected hurdle at the Command Hospital Air Force in Bangalore. On the last day of the medical, he was told that he was overweight by 21kg and so they had to let him go. “Not knowing what to do, I reached the commander’s office, but was not let in,” says Joseph. He tried every day for a week to meet the officer, but without success. “One day, as he was walking out for lunch, he stopped and asked, ‘Son, I’ve seen you here a few days. Why are you here?’” He explained the situation, and somehow convinced the officer to give him a month to reduce his weight. “I went home, and from morning till night, I was running, playing basketball, cycling and swimming, and one month later, I was down by 18kg. I went back to him in Bangalore. He was very happy. And that’s how I got admission into the NDA.”
NDA changed everything he had thought about flying. “Little did I know that it took many years of physical training and other education to get started,” he says. After the training at NDA, he went to the Air Force Academy in Dundigal, Telangana.
A career in the Air Force was probably the best thing Joseph could have had in India of the 1980s and 1990s. “I was enjoying my flying,” he says. “I flew in many parts of the country, including the Himalayan region, and had exciting missions. But then as you become senior, you get into the administrative side of things. And when it got to that stage, I realised that I was not flying much.”
Joseph always had a keen interest in making aircraft more efficient by designing them better. Though he was not an engineer, he spent a lot of time with the mechanics and the maintenance crew. “Very few pilots would really spend time with them,” he says. “I was knowledgeable about the mechanics and technical side of aircraft.”
But he hated pushing files, and did not want to spend the rest of his life doing that. And so, he made a big decision. “I decided to take voluntary retirement from the Air Force,” he says. “My family thought I was being stupid. They were very proud of my being an Air Force officer.”
And he was leaving that with no other job in sight. “It was just a dream,” says Joseph. “Only my mother supported me.” His mother, Roma, had lost her husband quite early and had raised five children on her own. A social worker, she raised 27 orphans in her house after her children left the nest. “She told me to follow my dreams,” says Joseph.
Support system: Captain Augustine Joseph with family.
And he did. But it was not easy. “It was a big, big decision,” says Joseph, who retired as a wing commander. He did not think about moving to another country at that time. He wanted to realise his dream of building planes in India. “I tried that path for some time, and I realised that I was pushing the wall, he says. “Those days, it was not easy to get anything done there. The system was heavily loaded against you. That was when I started thinking about going to a place where it could be done.”
Joseph moved to the US in 2000 on a student visa, along with his wife, Nancy, and son, Theodore. He had figured out that he could convert his licences in the US and then get into the aviation industry. But for that he had to attend a school there. It was expensive; so, he secured a bank loan to fund it.
When they landed in the US, he suddenly realised that he did not have a place to stay or a car to drive. “I used to be chauffeured around in government cars in India,” he says. “From there, I became a nobody.” He rented a small place and started training. “It was frustrating for me that I was much more experienced than the instructor who was teaching me, and I was paying him to teach me,” he says.
He worked overtime to get the licences as quickly as possible. “I ended up taking eight licenses―all the airplane licenses from the beginning to the highest and all the helicopter licenses from the beginning to the highest―in three months, which had never been done in the US,” says Joseph.
The real test, however, was getting a job. He had started applying for one even before he got the final licence. But nobody wanted to hire him because he was not American. But he did not give up. “I sent out hundreds of applications and got two responses,” he says. One of them was in Hawaii to fly helicopters. Joseph rang up the employer and asked if he could start the following Monday. Then he called up his examiner and asked if he could do the final test on Sunday. “It was Easter Sunday, but he agreed. I sold everything I had and took a one-way ticket to Hawaii,” he says.
Apparently, he had a Plan B. “I would have worked in a restaurant or sold peanuts and beef,” he says. “I had a friend who worked at Taj Kovalam in Thiruvananthapuram. He was the chief of the culinary science school there. I learned to make tandoori chicken from him.”
His Plan A, though, worked out quite well. He worked so hard that he soon became a director, and his employer let him run the company. A few years later, he started his own helicopter company. It had contracts from cruise ships to take their passengers to the active volcano Kilauea and to the waterfalls and valleys on the Hawaiian islands of Kauai, Maui and Oahu, where the movie Jurassic Park was shot. It also had contracts from the government geology department to take geologists to the volcano. It was a flourishing business. But then tragedy struck.
“One day, I was flying a helicopter with the geologists, eight passengers on board,” says Joseph. “When I was on top of the volcano, the engines failed. There was no place to land because it was all lava around. I knew that there was a small trail behind me that the geologists used to take. I quickly turned it around and crash-landed it on the slope of the volcano. Everybody survived. I broke my back, neck and a bunch of other bones. That got me into the hospital for several years.”
His doctors told him he would never walk again. But he refused to accept that. “I went every day to the gym, the swimming pool, and physiotherapy,” he says. And he went back to college and did two majors in business administration. But the hospital experience was the real education. He started a health care company called Surgery Planet that used technology to help patients get treatment at a lower cost. It was a success, with thousands of patients and hospitals signing up.
But Joseph knew he had to get back into flying as quickly as possible. “In the military, if you have an accident or somebody has crashed and died in your squadron, they typically have everybody fly the next day itself. So that people don’t have that mental block,” he says.
He got back on his feet in three and a half years. And he went straight back to the helicopter. “I had to do it to overcome that mental block, but I was sweating and my heart rate was very high,” he says. “But I had to control it and learn how to be comfortable inside the cockpit. It was a long process.”
Joseph had to sell his helicopter company to take care of the legal proceedings. “My passengers sued me because it was my company,” he says. He lost everything, including his house, and lived out of his car for months. “Every other week I was in deposition with the attorneys, going to the court, in a wheelchair,” he says. “And I had to raise two kids. People often think that a stroke of luck or an easy path made you successful. But, you know.”
Joseph sold the health care company, started a tech company, and sold that, too. He always wanted to be in aviation. And for that he had to be physically capable. “The fifth year after my accident, I ran the San Francisco Marathon, the Oakland Marathon and the Bay to Breakers footrace, which gave me the confidence that I was back,” he says. “I got my medical certificate and then I started a company for pilot training called JetEXE Aviation. It trains some 200 pilots a year from all over the world. We have 60 to 100 students every year from India.”
And then the Lancair opportunity came up. “It is not like one day I woke up and decided to buy Lancair,” says Joseph “I was maybe six or seven when I first dreamt about making planes. And after 50 years, the dream came true.” JetEXE acquired Lancair in October 2023.
Founded by Lance A. Neibauer in 1981, Lancair (pronounced lance-air) sold its first airplane kit in 1984. A kit aircraft is built by private individuals rather than in a factory, and is generally meant for recreational use. They are popular among enthusiasts because they are highly customisable. Lancair sells both kits and fully-assembled aircraft. And it has both experimental and certified planes as well. “The only difference between the certified and the non-certified is that you cannot use non-certified planes for commercial purposes,” says Joseph.
Currently, Colombian and Mexican defence forces also use Lancair aircraft for training of pilots. “There are several other countries that have used it,” says Joseph. Cessna bought one of its models, Columbia 400, and sold it for many years.
Experimental aircraft play an important role in innovation in aviation, because it is much easier to make changes on them than on certified aircraft. “The time it takes for getting certified by organisations like the FAA, or the DGCA in India, is very long and it is very expensive. It can take five to 10 years after you finish producing an airplane to get it certified. So, it is very difficult to make any changes.”
Unfortunately, the experimental aircraft ecosystem is almost non-existent in India. But Joseph wants to change that. “My dream now is to bring Lancair to India and start developing the market and make aviation a lot more prominent,” he says. “By the time some of our organisations finish the design, it is obsolete. We want to do it faster, keep up with technology and advancement so that we are competing globally.”
He is planning to associate with an Indian company with a presence in the segment. “We are looking into several leading organisations, which are already big manufacturing houses,” he says. “We have intelligent, smart, skilled people in India, and we can produce our own planes with our engineers. This is a good base from which we can start innovating and creating. It is not just for the Indian market. You can produce it in India and sell it worldwide.”