Wings of Duty

Wings of Duty — Page 4

Syed Muhammad Ahmad 4 the Punjab. Eventually, during the last decade of the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Mirza Ata Muhammad was able to return to Qadian and regain five of the 85 villages his family had lost. During these years away, the family’s residence—now known as Darul Masih— fell into decay. Only the frame of the building partially remained; everything else had been looted, stolen or destroyed. Some 15 years before Partition, towards the end of 1932, a small three-seater plane called a Puss Moth came to Qadian. The plane landed on a large field to the west of the railway station. The owner and pilot of the aircraft was Mr R N Chawla who in 1930 was the first Indian to fly a de Havilland Puss Moth from India to England. He had brought his plane to Qadian with the intention of taking it to London and then flying from there to Karachi to create a record for the shortest ever air journey between the two cities. At the time, the airport in Karachi was considered the centre of civil aviation in India. According to his proposed itinerary, he had to call in at 15 locations on the way to Karachi as his plane was unable to fly more than 300 miles at a time.