Manoj Chacko arrives mildly hungry at Copita Riverside Bistro & Bar in Ribandar near Old Goa. It’s an awkward time for a meal, 5pm, and the newly opened restaurant has just started business for the day.

The managing director and chief executive officer of regional carrier FLY91 asks for an egg bhurji, his go-to dish on most occasions. It’s off menu, but the staff graciously agree to get it as we sit by the Mandovi river on a dull weekday afternoon. Chacko’s office is close by—a rare airline headquartered in Goa and not in one of India’s major cities—which explains this choice of venue.

FLY91, which started in 2024, currently operates over 280 weekly flights connecting 13 destinations—Goa, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kochi, Sindhudurg, Solapur, Agatti, Jalgaon (which tops the list with 21 flights a week from three destinations), Hubballi, Vijayawada, Tirupati and Rajahmundry—using a fleet of six ATR aircraft.

It aims to connect over 50 cities in the next five years, by increasing its fleet to 50-plus in the next five years. In its first year, the airline operated over 3,500 flights and carried nearly 170,000 passengers in its ATR 72-600s. Their 66 pilots have done over 14,000 flights till now.

In early September, FLY91 signed up for another 40 ATR 72-600 aircraft, marking the largest ATR order globally by any regional airline, according to a press release, valued at approximately $1 billion.

FLY91’s ATRs (twin-engine turboprops that seat up to 78 passengers) take up a space in the skies that was once occupied by Vayudoot, the state-run regional airline that flew in the 1980s-90s, though India’s largest airline IndiGo is the biggest ATR operator in the country with an operational fleet of 44 turboprops. Once plagued with the reputation of being noisy and shaky in turbulence, Chacko assures of an upgrade in ATRs, with more comfortable seating, quick turnarounds so less waiting time on aerobridges, no awkward middle seats and lower turbulence or noise than anticipated.

“In sectors like Goa, Pune, we have become an airline of choice for business travellers,” says the 56-year-old.

HOW IT ALL STARTED

Chacko was born barely a kilometre west of Copita, at the Goa Medical College, a facility now occupied by the Goa Institute of Management. When Goa was liberated from the Portuguese in the 1960s, the then Union territory needed to attract talent to grow. Chacko’s parents, based at the time in Aden, Yemen, moved here to take up teaching jobs.

He went to school in Panjim, the nearest city, and then to the Goa College of Engineering in Farmagudi. A short turn at L&T in Powai, Mumbai, followed in 1990—his first real stint outside Goa—before he returned for a master’s degree in management studies, marketing and finance from Goa University.

As a child, Chacko admits, he was fascinated by planes. He would drop everything to watch an aircraft fly past overhead. He could tell one make of carrier from another. For some time, he harboured hopes of becoming a pilot before he started wearing spectacles at the age of 8.

He found engineering “too slow” and wanted to get into the services industry, which led him to the RPG group that had a general sales agency division for KLM and Northwest Airlines. When KLM was looking for a sales manager in Hyderabad, the offer came to Chacko who accepted—his first airline job. Emirates followed in 2011, in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kochi, Delhi and then Mumbai as a sales manager before Kingfisher Airlines came calling.

“Aviation is,” he says, “high adrenaline. It’s a very, very, very tough business because there are far too many moving parts. That challenge is fascinating.”

“You become a bit of an adrenaline junkie sometimes. Once you get into aviation, you can’t get into anything else because it’s too boring.”

While Kingfisher was one of his longest stints (from 2005-07 as head of sales, 2009-12 as executive vice-president), I ask him about his frequent shifts in jobs—two years at American Express as country head, Kuoni/SOTC for over five years, WNS Global Services for another four years.

Some changes happened by default, not by design, he explains. Emirates would have been a longer innings but they wanted him to move to Dubai, which he was reluctant to do. He left Kingfisher because of the merger with Air Deccan, and Amex also required a move to a global role in Sydney. Thomas Cook India acquired Kuoni India, which was rebranded as SOTC. His daughter was growing up and he didn’t want to mess around with her schooling by moving countries.

“I would have been still in WNS nine years down the line if FLY91 hadn’t happened,” he says, in between bites of his bhurji and sips of black tea.

With a ringside view to both the rise and collapse of Kingfisher Airlines which shut down in 2012, Chacko says successful airlines have little room for experimentation or errors. “Once you trust a model, you’ve got to stick to the model. You can’t play around with the model, which, I think Kingfisher did.”

“If the airline had stuck to the original model, I would say that it would have been another IndiGo story. The model was exactly what IndiGo delivered. Only difference is six lesser seats on the plane, but with in-flight entertainment and a great service.”

A NEW PLAN TAKES WING

But the lessons he learnt at Kingfisher stayed with him, like asset utilisation— “planes have to fly, they can’t be sitting on the ground”—and taking care of customers. The seeds of FLY91 airline, a name inspired by India’s ISD code, were sown when Kingfisher shut down. The airline had a regional network of ATRs that worked well, in Hubballi, Mysuru, Kolhapur etc. While that service didn’t make a lot of money, it cost less to operate. Chacko thought it would be a good idea to have a pure-play regional airline, which does not have the traditional overhead costs of a big airline.

He mentions data over the last decade, that out of 163 operational airports today, most of the narrow-body aircraft—Boeing 737s and Airbus 320s, the mainstay of Indian aviation—operate in less than 70 airports. Out of the 1,200 routes that exist in India, almost 780 are monopoly routes (IndiGo).

“Everybody is focused on the 30-32 main cities. But India’s growth is actually the tier-2, tier-3,” Chacko says.

As Chacko got his business plan ready, an airline from West Asia evinced interest in partnering. But when it came to raising money, he was stumped because he did not know how to. He would fly every other weekend to West Asia to refine the business plan but the project stalled at the fund-raising stage.

When Harsha Raghavan, the CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings (which had acquired SOTC and thus crossed paths with Chacko), started his own private equity fund Convergent Finance LLP in 2018, he agreed to come on board FLY91 as an anchor investor. But he had conditions—for Chacko to find the remaining investors, to quit WNS and focus only on this venture.

Chacko invested his life savings and left his job. He shed his initial reservations, and spent two years fund-raising ₹201 crore for the company Just Udo Aviation Pvt. Ltd., which operates FLY91. “There are days when I’ve got to pinch myself to say that I managed to do it,” he says with a smile. “I’m raising money on a PowerPoint and an Excel sheet, ₹250 crore till now, with zero experience of fund-raising.”

On 18 March 2024, the first flight of FLY91 took off from Goa for Bengaluru. About 20 seats were booked, the rest were filled with FLY91 employees from the housekeeping, transport divisions, etc.

“If I had a full-fledged airline, I couldn’t have headquarters here. But when you do regional…,” he pauses for a moment before adding, “we are actually a bus operator that flies, following the regulatory framework of aviation.”

THE GOA STORY

He elaborates on his many reasons for choosing to headquarter in Goa. First, he says, there are five airports within a 5-hour drive—two in Goa, one each in Sindhudurg, Belagavi and Hubbali. “This means when you have an operational disruption, your ability to recover the machine and the crew is high. If there is a technical problem, I can send men and material and recover the aircraft. For a small airline that’s important,” he says.

“One of our philosophies is, you start at the base (Mopa airport, north Goa), you come back to the base. Every fourth landing comes back to the base. If you start in the morning or afternoon, you come back in the afternoon or night (which saves hotel costs).”

Second, while Mopa was one of the most expensive airports to fly into in India, for a start-up airline, it had fewer constraints. They could pick up slots anytime, get parking bays. The third reason was Goa itself. One of the busiest destinations in India, with over 25 cities connected directly, he found it easy to attract talent for the company.

“Also, secretly,” Chacko admits, “I think I wanted to come back to Goa. Eventually, at some point of time, I would have come back here. Fate brought me back to the same village I was born in. So, maybe there was a… karmic connection.”

What keeps him awake, sometimes, at nights is concerns about maintaining a balance between employees, shareholders and customers’ satisfactions. Then there have been “near-death” moments, like bringing in an aircraft from Toulouse, France, after conflict had broken out over Iran. “Nothing can ever prepare you for entrepreneurship,” says Chacko, while admitting that he is someone who is unable to switch off from work. “I turned entrepreneur at the age of 52 when I was at the peak of my career, with a cushy job, a good salary. Every second month, I was either in the US or in Europe because my clients were global. To kick (away) all of that is not easy.”

His family has been supportive of his decisions, he says, before breaking into a grin. “My daughter, she is a doctor in Mumbai with no interest in aviation. She thinks that I am a bit cuckoo.”

Arun Janardhan (@iArunJ) is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle.

Manoj Chacko arrives mildly hungry at Copita Riverside Bistro & Bar in Ribandar near Old Goa. It’s an awkward time for a meal, 5pm, and the newly opened restaurant has just started business for the day.

The managing director and chief executive officer of regional carrier FLY91 asks for an egg bhurji, his go-to dish on most occasions. It’s off menu, but the staff graciously agree to get it as we sit by the Mandovi river on a dull weekday afternoon. Chacko’s office is close by—a rare airline headquartered in Goa and not in one of India’s major cities—which explains this choice of venue.

FLY91, which started in 2024, currently operates over 280 weekly flights connecting 13 destinations—Goa, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kochi, Sindhudurg, Solapur, Agatti, Jalgaon (which tops the list with 21 flights a week from three destinations), Hubballi, Vijayawada, Tirupati and Rajahmundry—using a fleet of six ATR aircraft.

It aims to connect over 50 cities in the next five years, by increasing its fleet to 50-plus in the next five years. In its first year, the airline operated over 3,500 flights and carried nearly 170,000 passengers in its ATR 72-600s. Their 66 pilots have done over 14,000 flights till now.

In early September, FLY91 signed up for another 40 ATR 72-600 aircraft, marking the largest ATR order globally by any regional airline, according to a press release, valued at approximately $1 billion.

FLY91’s ATRs (twin-engine turboprops that seat up to 78 passengers) take up a space in the skies that was once occupied by Vayudoot, the state-run regional airline that flew in the 1980s-90s, though India’s largest airline IndiGo is the biggest ATR operator in the country with an operational fleet of 44 turboprops. Once plagued with the reputation of being noisy and shaky in turbulence, Chacko assures of an upgrade in ATRs, with more comfortable seating, quick turnarounds so less waiting time on aerobridges, no awkward middle seats and lower turbulence or noise than anticipated.

“In sectors like Goa, Pune, we have become an airline of choice for business travellers,” says the 56-year-old.

HOW IT ALL STARTED

Chacko was born barely a kilometre west of Copita, at the Goa Medical College, a facility now occupied by the Goa Institute of Management. When Goa was liberated from the Portuguese in the 1960s, the then Union territory needed to attract talent to grow. Chacko’s parents, based at the time in Aden, Yemen, moved here to take up teaching jobs.

He went to school in Panjim, the nearest city, and then to the Goa College of Engineering in Farmagudi. A short turn at L&T in Powai, Mumbai, followed in 1990—his first real stint outside Goa—before he returned for a master’s degree in management studies, marketing and finance from Goa University.

As a child, Chacko admits, he was fascinated by planes. He would drop everything to watch an aircraft fly past overhead. He could tell one make of carrier from another. For some time, he harboured hopes of becoming a pilot before he started wearing spectacles at the age of 8.

He found engineering “too slow” and wanted to get into the services industry, which led him to the RPG group that had a general sales agency division for KLM and Northwest Airlines. When KLM was looking for a sales manager in Hyderabad, the offer came to Chacko who accepted—his first airline job. Emirates followed in 2011, in Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Kochi, Delhi and then Mumbai as a sales manager before Kingfisher Airlines came calling.

“Aviation is,” he says, “high adrenaline. It’s a very, very, very tough business because there are far too many moving parts. That challenge is fascinating.”

“You become a bit of an adrenaline junkie sometimes. Once you get into aviation, you can’t get into anything else because it’s too boring.”

While Kingfisher was one of his longest stints (from 2005-07 as head of sales, 2009-12 as executive vice-president), I ask him about his frequent shifts in jobs—two years at American Express as country head, Kuoni/SOTC for over five years, WNS Global Services for another four years.

Some changes happened by default, not by design, he explains. Emirates would have been a longer innings but they wanted him to move to Dubai, which he was reluctant to do. He left Kingfisher because of the merger with Air Deccan, and Amex also required a move to a global role in Sydney. Thomas Cook India acquired Kuoni India, which was rebranded as SOTC. His daughter was growing up and he didn’t want to mess around with her schooling by moving countries.

“I would have been still in WNS nine years down the line if FLY91 hadn’t happened,” he says, in between bites of his bhurji and sips of black tea.

With a ringside view to both the rise and collapse of Kingfisher Airlines which shut down in 2012, Chacko says successful airlines have little room for experimentation or errors. “Once you trust a model, you’ve got to stick to the model. You can’t play around with the model, which, I think Kingfisher did.”

“If the airline had stuck to the original model, I would say that it would have been another IndiGo story. The model was exactly what IndiGo delivered. Only difference is six lesser seats on the plane, but with in-flight entertainment and a great service.”

A NEW PLAN TAKES WING

But the lessons he learnt at Kingfisher stayed with him, like asset utilisation— “planes have to fly, they can’t be sitting on the ground”—and taking care of customers. The seeds of FLY91 airline, a name inspired by India’s ISD code, were sown when Kingfisher shut down. The airline had a regional network of ATRs that worked well, in Hubballi, Mysuru, Kolhapur etc. While that service didn’t make a lot of money, it cost less to operate. Chacko thought it would be a good idea to have a pure-play regional airline, which does not have the traditional overhead costs of a big airline.

He mentions data over the last decade, that out of 163 operational airports today, most of the narrow-body aircraft—Boeing 737s and Airbus 320s, the mainstay of Indian aviation—operate in less than 70 airports. Out of the 1,200 routes that exist in India, almost 780 are monopoly routes (IndiGo).

“Everybody is focused on the 30-32 main cities. But India’s growth is actually the tier-2, tier-3,” Chacko says.

As Chacko got his business plan ready, an airline from West Asia evinced interest in partnering. But when it came to raising money, he was stumped because he did not know how to. He would fly every other weekend to West Asia to refine the business plan but the project stalled at the fund-raising stage.

When Harsha Raghavan, the CEO of Fairfax Financial Holdings (which had acquired SOTC and thus crossed paths with Chacko), started his own private equity fund Convergent Finance LLP in 2018, he agreed to come on board FLY91 as an anchor investor. But he had conditions—for Chacko to find the remaining investors, to quit WNS and focus only on this venture.

Chacko invested his life savings and left his job. He shed his initial reservations, and spent two years fund-raising ₹201 crore for the company Just Udo Aviation Pvt. Ltd., which operates FLY91. “There are days when I’ve got to pinch myself to say that I managed to do it,” he says with a smile. “I’m raising money on a PowerPoint and an Excel sheet, ₹250 crore till now, with zero experience of fund-raising.”

On 18 March 2024, the first flight of FLY91 took off from Goa for Bengaluru. About 20 seats were booked, the rest were filled with FLY91 employees from the housekeeping, transport divisions, etc.

“If I had a full-fledged airline, I couldn’t have headquarters here. But when you do regional…,” he pauses for a moment before adding, “we are actually a bus operator that flies, following the regulatory framework of aviation.”

THE GOA STORY

He elaborates on his many reasons for choosing to headquarter in Goa. First, he says, there are five airports within a 5-hour drive—two in Goa, one each in Sindhudurg, Belagavi and Hubbali. “This means when you have an operational disruption, your ability to recover the machine and the crew is high. If there is a technical problem, I can send men and material and recover the aircraft. For a small airline that’s important,” he says.

“One of our philosophies is, you start at the base (Mopa airport, north Goa), you come back to the base. Every fourth landing comes back to the base. If you start in the morning or afternoon, you come back in the afternoon or night (which saves hotel costs).”

Second, while Mopa was one of the most expensive airports to fly into in India, for a start-up airline, it had fewer constraints. They could pick up slots anytime, get parking bays. The third reason was Goa itself. One of the busiest destinations in India, with over 25 cities connected directly, he found it easy to attract talent for the company.

“Also, secretly,” Chacko admits, “I think I wanted to come back to Goa. Eventually, at some point of time, I would have come back here. Fate brought me back to the same village I was born in. So, maybe there was a… karmic connection.”

What keeps him awake, sometimes, at nights is concerns about maintaining a balance between employees, shareholders and customers’ satisfactions. Then there have been “near-death” moments, like bringing in an aircraft from Toulouse, France, after conflict had broken out over Iran. “Nothing can ever prepare you for entrepreneurship,” says Chacko, while admitting that he is someone who is unable to switch off from work. “I turned entrepreneur at the age of 52 when I was at the peak of my career, with a cushy job, a good salary. Every second month, I was either in the US or in Europe because my clients were global. To kick (away) all of that is not easy.”

His family has been supportive of his decisions, he says, before breaking into a grin. “My daughter, she is a doctor in Mumbai with no interest in aviation. She thinks that I am a bit cuckoo.”

Arun Janardhan (@iArunJ) is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle.