Pole Position

Four women pilots break the glass ceiling, steer Air India’s inaugural longest flight and maiden route over the North Pole

- KATHAKALI CHANDA

For three days leading up to her flight from San Francisco to Bengaluru on January 9, Captain Zoya Agarwal didn’t step out of her room. “It’s really a first for me. I’m not a person who usually does that,” says Agarwal, a pilot with Air India, India’s flagship carrier. Cooped up, Agarwal pored over the flight plan over and over again: What to do if the fuel temperature went really low, what were the appropriate airports to divert to in case of an emergency, how to communicate in a radio blackout zone, what have you.

Agarwal has been flying international sectors for Air India for 17 years, crisscrossing the globe every week. She landed from Milan the day before speaking to Forbes India, and was scheduled to take off for Chicago in the next few days. But the flight from San Francisco was unlike any other she had flown till now—it was Air India’s inaugural non-stop, connecting the American Silicon Valley with Bengaluru, its Indian counterpart. The route covering 16,000-odd km (and a flight time of 17 hours and 25 minutes) was the longest for an Indian airline, and the sixth-longest in the world, says Statista, a data platform.

But the significance of the flight transcended mere aviation statistics—it was the country’s first flight to traverse via the North Pole, a geography of unpredictable and treacherous climatic conditions. And what elevated its historicity by a few notches was an all-woman crew at the cockpit: Commanders Agarwal and Thanmai Papagari, along with first officers Shivani Manhas and Akansha Sonawane.