WASHINGTON — The U.S. Air Force is experimenting with a combination of drones, artificial intelligence and cloud collaboration to search out ways to slash the time it takes to examine aircraft for wear and tear.
In trials backed by aircraft manufacturer Boeing and Near Earth Autonomy, a developer of drone operating systems, service technicians at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii are launching autonomous uncrewed aerial systems with mounted cameras to catalog the condition of Boeing C-17 cargo planes that transport heavy weapons and passengers.
The goal is to cut back the complexity of aircraft checkups while also improving the accuracy and reliability of knowledge. Whereas traditional exterior examinations can take hours and still miss tiny details, the drone-centric approach, fueled by pattern recognition and 3D models, is way quicker and feeds verified observations to a secure repository, officials said.
“A preflight inspection without delay can take as much as 4 hours. We will do it in half-hour. That may be a significant time savings for airmen and ensuring that the aircraft is offered, able to go,” Alli Locher, a manager with Near Earth Autonomy, told reporters June 27 at an event in Virginia. “Eventually you’ll have the opportunity to only pull up a tail number, click anywhere on that 3D model of that aircraft and have the opportunity to see a history of images of that exact part you clicked on, from anywhere on the planet over the lifetime of the aircraft.”
Because the U.S. Defense Department prepares for potential fights within the Indo-Pacific region and Europe, the Air Force is pursuing an idea often known as Agile Combat Employment. ACE envisions a hub-and-spoke layout of bases: some larger and stuck, some smaller and mobile.
RELATED
![This photograph, taken June 13, 2022, shows the Lockheed Martin logo on display at the Eurosatory conference in France.](https://www.defensenews.com/resizer/Pf_G_4J-KQ6OtyrxthycX_G2Ego=/800x0/filters:format(jpg):quality(70)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/archetype/RUHYYXYHMRFWZPS5Y7G4TTAS3Y.jpg)
Such an approach will opened up human effort and know-how — resources already in high demand — so having a reliable, centralized technique of collecting and evaluating the status of an aircraft can be all of the more essential, in response to Scott Belanger, a Boeing Global Services executive. Boeing is the third-largest defense contractor on the planet when ranked by defense revenue.
“The images are, literally, instantaneously live, sent to a cloud environment, where they might be analyzed by Near Earth Autonomy software and our automated damage detection software,” he said. “We’re not trying to switch the human inspection. We’re attempting to inform it. We’re attempting to upskill that human inspection so after they do go on the tail, they’re not guessing: They know exactly what to bring, they know exactly what to anticipate.”
In testing, the drones and associated routines have detected “as much as 76%, 78% damage,” in response to Belanger. While that’s a “high C,” he said, it beats out the human-only metric of fifty%.
Moving forward, Boeing and Near Earth Autonomy are eyeing more payloads for the drones, to potentially catch subsurface damage, in addition to adding more aircraft to the inspection roster. Lockheed Martin’s C-5 plane was most recently programmed, in response to Locher. Boeing’s KC-135 and KC-46 might be next.
“Our secret sauce here, that we use, is we’ve an autonomy back end on this drone that all the time knows where it’s relative to the aircraft, not the environment around it,” Locher said. “With that, you’ll be able to just about run any sensor and get a map of that sensor.”
Colin Demarest is a reporter at C4ISRNET, where he covers military networks, cyber and IT. Colin previously covered the Department of Energy and its National Nuclear Security Administration — namely Cold War cleanup and nuclear weapons development — for a each day newspaper in South Carolina. Colin can also be an award-winning photographer.