Nagpur: A few years ago, none would have believed if someone had predicted that Shrikant Pantawane would hit the skies one day.
He was then driving a three-wheeled auto rickshaw in Nagpur. He now drives a three-wheeled vehicle, but it flies in the sky. Today, he is on IndiGo’s pilot roster.
Pantawane’s father was a security guard who struggled hard to make the ends meet. That limited Pantawane’s dreams.
The young man had to start earning early and he juggled school with a job as a delivery boy, driving around in an auto.
It was during an airport delivery that Pantawane struck up a conversation with a tea-stall vendor and learnt of the pilot scholarship program run by aviation regulator the Directorate General of Civil Aviation.
Pantawane made the cut for the scholarship and before he knew it he was at a flying school in Madhya Pradesh. At flight school he topped every assessment, IndiGo said.
However, there would be still some time till Pantawane could give flight to his dreams. After, he got his commercial pilot license he had to bide some time working as a corporate executive because of lack of opportunities owing to a sluggish market.
The wait for Pantawane to soar the skies in a commercial aircraft finally came to an end when he got selected by budget carrier IndiGo. Pantawane is now a first officer also known as second pilot or co-pilot with the airline, profit.ndtv.com reported.
Commercial pilots start their career as a first officer.
IndiGo, on Monday shared on micro-blogging site Twitter, an excerpt of Pantawane’s exceptional story which features in their in-house magazine for the month.