Nevill Vintcent, a South African, born in 1902, entered Osborne in 1916, proceeded to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, and served in HMS Temeraire for a few months during the Great War.
In 1928 he, with a partner, undertook one of the early long-distance pioneer flights, when they flew two de Havilland DH.9 aeroplanes from England to India.
J R D Tata, in a de Havilland Puss Moth took the mail on to Bombay, where Nevill Vintcent then took over for the leg to Madras, arriving on 16 October.
[1] On 25 February 1935 Vintcent made an inaugural flight from Bombay to Nagpur to Jamshedpur and on to Calcutta with a de Havilland Fox Moth.
The approach of war in Europe impressed upon Vintcent and others the strategic need for an aircraft factory in India, and thereafter to that end his mind and activities were more and more concentrated.
But in 1941 Vintcent flew to England at the request of Lord Beaverbrook, then Minister of Aircraft Production and obtained a contract for the construction of troop-carrying gliders, and set about the organization of the company and the building of the factory at Poona.