“The door of a plane came off once while he was learning to fly”

Mumbai: Mumbai boy Cleon Alvares, 25, is lying somewhere in the alligator-and-snake-infested swamps of Everglades in Florida, 8,800 miles away from home.
He is alive, his father Christopher hopes against hope as the 48-year-old gets on a plane for the first time to go to Lantana from where his son took off on a Cessna for a solo training flight on Saturday.
The 31-year-old plane went down after colliding with another.
“My son told me before leaving for the US that he would show me the world from the clouds one day. I have never been on a plane,” a tearful Christopher said.
Cleon had left in July to train to become a professional pilot at a Florida academy (Kemper Aviation), 99 per cent of whose students are Indian. Another of its students from Mumbai, 18-year-old Arjun Chhikkara, died in a crash in October.
The middle-class Alvareses had paid Rs 30 lakh for the 10-month course at Kemper Aviation, part-owned by NRI Akshay Mohan who is a pilot with Kingfisher Airlines.

Cleon later told his family that Kemper’s safety standards were abominable and living conditions poor. “The door of a plane came off once while he was learning to fly,” said his sister Joyce, 21.
Now, even as Christopher leaves with an impossible prayer in his heart that Cleon — officially “untraced” — be found alive, his son has been declared dead by the aviation school.
“They have put up an obituary note for him at the academy,” Joyce said.
Akshay Mohan, a former student of the academy, recruits students from India. The India head office in Delhi is run by his father, Col (Retd) Chander Mohan. “It is an unfortunate incident. We are trying to mend the loose ends,” Col Mohan said.
But Arjun’s family is planning legal action against the academy which, like many other aviation schools in the US, scouts for students in Mumbai.
“We were told the engine of his plane (a 30-year-old Piper) failed,” said his mother Mona Chhikkara.
Arjun had often spoken about engine failures on training flights.
Complaints against Kemper can also be found on www.airnav.com, a US-based pilots networking site.
The local sheriff’s office in Lantana has told Cleon’s family the search will continue through this week but the possibility of finding his remains is thin.
“They found the body of the other pilot, a US citizen, but are not willing to spend any more time looking for my brother or his remains,” Joyce said.

Four days after Cleon left to pursue his dream on July 4, a teenager from Kerala, Varsha Gopinath, was killed in a mid-air collision in the Philippines. She, too, was on a training flight on a Cessna.
The aviation boom and the shortage of pilot training schools in India is driving hordes of young men and women to unknown flying schools that lack even the basic safety standards. Many boys from Mumbai have enrolled with Kemper.
15/12/07 Samyabrata Ray Goswami/The Telegraph