We have often come across the families full of doctors, engineers and even civil services officers but its very hard to find a family where three generations of its members are aviators. Meet the Bhasin family whose five members — parents, two children and their late grandfather — have nearly 100 years of flying among them.
Captain Jai Dev Bhasin was among the first seven pilots in the country to become a commander in 1954. He joined the National Airways before shifting to Indian Airlines in 1956 from which he retired as a senior pilot in 1986. When his future daughter-in-law Nivedita Jain joined his company, Indian Airlines, she was the third woman to do so.
Jai Dev’s son Rohit is a commander with Air India with over three decades of flying experience, which includes flying President Pratibha Patil on her foreign tours.
However, Rohit was not keen on following in his father’s footsteps when he was growing up in Kolkata. Rohit thought he would either become a tennis player or a tea taster but his first flight changed his thinking. “I flew in the cockpit of the Airbus A-300 along with my father from Chennai to Singapore and it was a wow experience,” he told The Hindu.
PTI
Nivdeita and Rohit are proud parents of two young commanders, Rohan and Niharika Bhasin.
“Flying fascinated me for as long as I can remember. Maybe when I was as young as six or seven,” PTI quoted Niharika as saying.
Her face lights up recounting the most important day of her life as if it were yesterday.
“I was at a friend’s birthday party when my father came running with an appointment letter for me from Indian Airlines. The day is etched in my memory. It was June 29, 1984,” she says.
She was just 20 when she received the letter and in the next 11 years, went on to achieve her most cherished career milestones.
At 26, already a mother of a one-year-old, she received her command on Boeing 737, becoming the youngest woman captain of a jet plane in the world.
Nivedita Bhasin was the first pilot in her company to become a mother and it was in the years following her first child that the company instituted a policy on maternity leave.
Her feats set her apart and her children say they were in awe of her from their early days.
“As a a child I used to keep looking at her while she was getting ready for work and I really wanted to dress up like that one day,” says Niharika, 26, who works for IndiGo and not Air India. Bhasins have collectively captained and flown almost all the aircraft flown by domestic airlines in India.
29 year old Captain Rohan Bhasin, who is an Air Indian for 10 years and flies the Boeing 777 as a commander, said the thought of pursuing any other career never crossed his mind.
“I was appearing for an interview for KG class when I introduced myself as Captain Rohan Bhasin. Somehow I felt that since both my parents were captains then I must also be one. I was obsessed with aircraft,” he said.
His favourite TV shows were Wings and Extreme Machines on Discovery Channel and the books he read were about different kinds of military aircraft, he adds.
PTI inputs
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