India is not the place most people would expect to find precision engineering. Yet Guillaume Capato is on the shop floor of the Mahindra Aerospace factory, an hour's drive from Bangalore, explaining the complexity of an aluminium halter, used to reinforce the fuselage on a jet aircraft. Formed from a single piece of metal into a u-shape using a press, each side is of a different size and shape and drilled with holes of varying dimensions so that the part will precisely match all the other bolt holes around it. The halter is accurate to an exacting degree: it only makes sense to add weight to an aircraft's structure if it also adds strength. That principle is lost in India, where the weight of regulation has sapped the strength of manufacturing.
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