Formula 1 turns a car around in 1.80 seconds. McLaren, Qatar, October 2023 — still the record.
That is a ridiculous number to put in front of a transporter and I am not going to pretend otherwise. No 32-footer is doing 1.8 seconds. Nobody at a hub in Bhiwandi is standing over one vehicle with a wheel gun in his hand.
So take a less ridiculous one.
TWENTY MINUTES
IndiGo turns an A320 around in twenty to twenty-five minutes. An Indian company. A low-cost carrier, which means every rupee is counted. No wind tunnel, no glamour.
In those twenty minutes: passengers off, cabin cleaned, catering swapped, bags out, bags in, refuel, crew change, passengers back on, doors closed. Nine activities, most of them happening at the same time as each other.
And the reward is not applause. It is that IndiGo gets twelve to thirteen flying hours a day out of an aircraft where the rest of the industry gets eight to ten. That is not a service improvement. That is several more hours of flying a day out of the same aeroplane, for the same capital — and any fleet owner reading this has already done the arithmetic.
Still too glamorous? Then look inside our own industry.
Forty-five million Indians across thirty-plus cities now get goods delivered to their door in an average of under twelve minutes. Sixty-four thousand crore of it in FY25. Not a pilot. Not a pitch deck. Today, at scale, in the same country, in the same business we are in.
NOW WALK INTO A HUB
A truck reached the hub at 07:47. At 11:50 it was still standing there.
Four hours and three minutes — and this is the part that should bother you — nobody inside the building could have told you that without walking outside to look at it.
Same event as the pit stop. Same event as the aircraft. A vehicle stopped while work is done on it. Unload, load, inspect, refuel, change the driver, finish the paperwork. The activities are the same in kind. The difference is that in the other two, somebody is counting.
WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS
Here is the bit that gets missed, and it is the whole argument.
None of those three go fast by working harder.
The pit crew is over the wall before the car enters the lane. IndiGo's ground staff are standing on the stand before the aircraft is on the ground. The cleaners, the fuel bowser, the bag carts, the catering truck — every one of them positioned before the thing arrives.
They are not faster. They are ready.
And readiness is not a labour problem. It is not a machinery problem. Nobody needs to buy anything.
Readiness is a data problem.
If you know at nine in the morning that six vehicles will land between eleven and half past, you roster the unloading team for eleven, you stage the equipment at the right bay, you call the cleaners, and you have the outbound driver sitting there with his e-way bill already done. Everything happens at once because everything was in position before the horn sounded.
If you find out the vehicle has arrived because the horn sounded, none of that is possible. You are not slow. You are surprised. Every single time.
YOU MAY SNEER
Fine — you may say a transporter is not an airline. Fair. Roads are not runways, a driver is not a first officer, and no hub manager gets a slot time from ATC.
But notice what you have just argued. You have argued that because the environment is variable, knowing less about it is acceptable. It is exactly the other way round. IndiGo can plan to twenty-odd minutes because a flight is predictable. Your lane is not predictable, which makes knowing what is coming worth more to you than it is to them, not less.
We have simply decided, as an industry, that faster is not possible. Quick commerce did not decide that. It went and did it, on Indian roads, with Indian traffic, in the same twelve-minute window we would have called fantasy in 2019.
AT WEBXPRESS
We have built Pitlane for exactly this.
Four boards, one screen. What is entering the lane — and when, and how late. What is in the box, and for how long. What is rolling out. And what is standing idle doing nothing.
One live hub, an ordinary Saturday morning: 79 vehicles inbound, nine of them already delayed. One in the box — arrived 07:47, dwell four hours three minutes, due out 13:47, and the board counting down one hour fifty-six. 47 rolling out. And 298 vehicles sitting free, on no report anywhere.
The arrivals view is drawn as a radar — rings are distance to arrival, colour is delay. That screen is not decoration. It is the readiness screen. It is the answer to what is coming and when, which is the only question a pit crew ever needs answered.
It runs on a wall. Not on a laptop in a cabin — a screen bolted where the unloading team walks past it, refreshing itself, that nobody has to ask.
THE HONEST PART
The first week is ugly.
Rows come up reading NO ETA. At the hub above, one "free" vehicle had been idle for months, which told us more about the vehicle master than about the yard. Every hub that switches this on discovers its GPS coverage and its trip-closure discipline are worse than the monthly MIS had suggested. The MIS was averaged, rounded and presented by people. The board is not.
That is not the board failing. That is the first object in the building with no reputation to protect.
And to be plain about what we are and are not selling: we are not promising you twenty minutes. Twenty minutes is your operation's business, not our software's. We are promising you will know what is coming, early enough to be standing there when it does.
Everything else follows from that.
IndiGo did not buy faster aeroplanes.