A magnificent Mysorean and his flying machines
India’s first aviator SV Setty dreamt of building India’s first aircraft in Bangalore, but WWI (1914-1918) put his plans on hold.
As an (admittedly tortuous) exercise in self-control, let us desist from speaking today the two topics uppermost in the Bengalurean mind – the weather and voting day – and speak instead of the deep human yearning to ‘slip the surly bonds of Earth, and dance the skies on laughter-silvered wings.’ Let us speak, in particular, of a remarkable aviator from Mysuru, who, two decades before the great JRD Tata famously piloted the ‘first flight in the history of Indian aviation’ from Karachi to Bombay in 1932, had danced the skies in planes he himself had helped design.
Given that he was born in 1879, flying hadn’t always been on Srirama Venkatasubba Setty’s bucket list. After completing his Bachelor’s degree in Arts in Maharaja’s College, Mysore, he enrolled at the engineering college at Guindy, Madras, from where he transferred to the storied Thomason College (later IIT Roorkee), excited by the prospect of getting a degree in a new discipline – Electrical Engineering. Graduating in 1906, he joined the Mysore PWD (Public Works Department) and was happily occupied for the next few years.
In 1909, Setty won a scholarship to the prestigious Faraday House, a London engineering college funded by the industry ‘before electrical engineering was respectable at universities.’ The diploma course included industry internships, and Setty had a grand time learning about power generation and distribution.
But it was impossible to be a mechanical-minded young man in England at the time and not be swept up in dreams of flying. On December 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers had completed the world’s first manned and powered flight over the dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. On July 25, 1909, the year that Setty arrived in England, French aviator Louis Bleriot became the first to fly a plane across the Channel, bringing the excitement closer home. In 1911, thanks to a generous Mysore patron, SV Setty was able to stay on in England and join A V Roe and Company (founded 1910; later Avro), among the first British aircraft building companies, as an ‘apprentice and unpaid draughtsman.’
One of the great (and dangerous) compensations of the job was the opportunity to test and fly planes, which Setty, who had also enrolled at the Avro Flying School at the Brooklands Airfield in Surrey, made gleeful use of. But the planes were unreliable and crashed often. A designer at heart, Setty took it upon himself to fix the problem. The test flight of the biplane with Setty’s design, piloted by the man himself, so impressed Aussie aviation pioneer, John Duigan, that he immediately booked one for himself. That biplane became the prototype of the Avro Duigan, which in turn was the inspiration for the Avro 500 and the famous training aircraft, the Avro 504, which was produced more than any other military airplane during World War I.
In June 1912, out of funds and unable to complete the flying hours required for a pilot’s licence, Setty returned home. The delighted Dewan of Mysore, Sir M Visvesvaraya, installed him forthwith as superintendent of the kingdom’s first technical school in then-Bangalore. That school, in 1917, became Mysore’s first School of Engineering. Today, it continues to flourish as the University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE).
SV Setty dreamt of building India’s first aircraft in Bangalore, but WWI (1914-1918) put his plans on hold. In 1918, the Spanish Flu swept through Bangalore, felling a fifth of the city’s population, including, tragically, India’s first aviator himself. He was only 38. Setty must have manifested that vision hard, though – in 1940, India’s first aircraft factory, Hindustan Aircraft Limited, did come up in the city, just as he had hoped.
Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru
