The Future of Aircraft Inspection

** Originally published on LinkedIn

The background: Why do we need UAV to be used for aircraft inspection?

Aircraft inspections are the best ways airline operators can do to ensure the safety of flight, but often the inspectors themselves put their life at risk only to do the inspection. In order to properly review the aircraft, inspectors have to utilize cranes and lifts to closely examine or climb on the aircraft to inspect structure and components. This can be dangerous; as modern aircraft is so huge and tall; an inspector usually needs to climb up to a few storeys high to do their work. Moreover, this is a slow and laborious process. This traditional inspection technique needed to be replaced soon to enable to growth of aviation industry by reducing aircraft turnover and aircraft on ground time.

A great way to cut cost and reduce risk dramatically is by using a much smaller kind of aircraft: the drone. A drone or UAV is agile and versatile; it can reach most hard-to-reach places quickly. With advanced technology equipped, it can perform much better work than human.

Currently, there are companies that actively researching the drone inspection technology, namely Airbus, easyJet and Air New Zealand. Although the drone inspection is yet to be as good as an experienced engineer, it will be outperforming very soon. Drone can evolve with our technology advancement, but human cannot. Drone is equipped with super high resolution camera, which reportedly is sharper than human eyes, can easily detect hairline crack that could not be detected by human eyes. Utilizing advance technology like Intel’s RealSense, the aircraft condition can be model into 3D and send back to base station in real time. With proper control, drones can be deployed as a fleet, which distribute workload among them and can accomplish the task much more quickly. Incorporating a cloud based computation system enables the drones to communicate one another and all their findings can be shown on a user friendly interface. The result of inspection can be pushed as notification to the engineer’s computer or smart phone, once the inspection is complete. The whole process can be completed in minutes, in contrast to hours when human being involved.

The computational power needed by drone can be easily achieved by a modern low power processor, the detection cameras and sensors are very common as well. We can build a high performance drone in a very tight budget, which we could only imagine 10 years ago. In the software aspect, artificial intelligence and machine deep learning is at its golden age. In recent research, computer has less error compare to human in the same task. With combined advance hardware and software, drone could easily outperform human in every aspect.

The argument: But why we still don’t have drone flying all over the airport.

First, most of us, the humans, do not easily trust something that they do not understand. Many that are not exposed to technological advancement are more reluctant to adapt changes caused by technology. They afraid that they could not have control over the machine and they claimed that machine is not perfect. What they do not know is that human fails more frequently than machine. They always think that human are more superior than machine. Next, utilizing drone to do inspection is a fairly new topic in aviation industry, despite the concept of it was discovered long time ago. Many research still need to be done, to improvise the drone in every aspect, and to make a perfect inspection drone. OEM, MRO and airliner have to work closely together to build a standard around it and put in effort to push the research forward. If no pressure was exerting on the research, we will never see the day of completion. Third, the authorities have yet to approve such method as a widely available and certified method. The risk of drone inspection in current phase of technology is unknown. The effect to work environment, the economical aspect and the potential risk was not yet uncovered. Only time and more research and testing will teach us all the yet to be known.

One way or another, drone inspection is arriving strong and very soon than we expected. It may not be reliable now, but it will soon.