Neel Khokhani

The school operates out of Melbourne's Moorabbin Airport, Bendigo Airport in Central Victoria and Sydney's Bankstown Airport, with full- and part-time courses available to beginners through to advanced entry.

It's an astonishing achievement. It's even more extraordinary when you consider that Neel had just A$5,000 to invest in the business and no essential equipment - not even a plane.

He was, however, armed with a brazen strategy. Neel had no doubt that a global shortage of pilots, with Australia only producing around 1,000 a year, triggered a need for a flying school. The trick was to make it viable to students.

"I knew that by 2034, the global demand for pilots would reach 650,000; 100 new pilots a day," he explains. "As the world's fourth largest producer of pilots, Australia makes a very small dent in this shortage, so I had to think backwards and discover why we were providing so few.

"I realised my competitors were only offering full-time flying courses from Monday to Friday during hours really only accessible to school leavers. I wanted a different demographic, 25- to 44-year-olds, but knew they came with obligations such as a mortgage or a family to feed, and couldn't necessarily take time off work to learn to fly. So, I also devised a part-time course offering theory in the evenings and flying on the weekends. It tapped into a whole new market."

Scheduling aside, the next and arguably most vital step was to purchase a plane. Neel believed a large enough database would raise the required funds of at least A$150,000. If he failed to reach the target, he'd simply return the money.