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`First Indian Jumbo pilot'
NEVER A DULL MOMENT IN HIS LIFE K.M. (Matt) Mathen
Coinciding with the report the other day that the Madras Flying Club was being revived, there landed on my desk a little book about one of its early trainees and members, titled Million Mile Pilot. The book, by Jaiboy Joseph, succinctly tells the story of K. M. (Matt) Mathen, who was once headlined the "First Indian Jumbo Pilot".
Mathen learnt his flying under Tyndale Bosco and M. I. Khan at the Madras Flying Club in 1939-40. The Club had been founded in 1929 and inaugurated in 1930, not 1976 as was recently stated. Mathen later joined the Royal India Air Force and was posted to 1 Squadron commanded by Arjan Singh who went on to become India's first Air Chief Marshal. This was the same squadron Rajaram and Sitaram (Miscellany, March 13) flew with. Sixty years ago, Mathen joined Tata Airlines and fifty years ago he was made Chief Pilot of Air India International.
Pioneering Air India's Singapore-Sydney and Delhi-Moscow routes, he went on to command the first non-stop delivery flight of the Boeing 707, landing in Bombay on March 7, 1970 after flying the distance in a record time. At times he was averaging nearly 700 mph. In 1969, he followed this up with being the first Indian pilot to fly a `Jumbo', as the huge Boeing 747 was named. By then, he had flown everything from the Puss Moth in Madras to the Jumbos in the U.S.
It was brother Mathulla, then Controller of Finance, Tata Steel, who persuaded a jobless, aimless Mathen, a couple of years out of Madras Christian College, to learn flying and join the Air Force. A decade later, in 1948, Mathulla became CEO of Air India and, before long, was finding across the negotiating table younger brother Mathen who had helped found the Indian Pilots Guild. When Mathen passed away in 1995 in Bombay, it was in a hospital ward that the Air Indian Pilots' health insurance scheme, formulated by Mathen, was sponsored.
Advertised by Air India as its `multi-million mile pilot', Mathen retired in 1976 as Air India's Director of Technical Planning. A born storyteller, many remember his retelling the story of the Tashkent-Moscow flight he captained while a couple of volunteers aboard and two stewardesses helped a diplomat's wife give birth in the coat compartment; he recalls praying all the time that there wouldn't be any air pockets! The baby born at 34,000 feet was named `Annapurna' after the aircraft. Then there was the occasion when he commanded the flight from Rome to Delhi with Jackie Kennedy, during Camelot's heyday, aboard. No sooner the passengers were requested to get ready for landing than he received a message from his VIP passenger to the effect, "Could the Commander please delay the landing by 20 minutes as Mrs. Kennedy's hairdo was not yet complete?" There was never a dull moment in Mathen's life from the time he entered the portals of the Madras Flying Club in Meenambakkam.
S. MUTHIAH
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