DOVER AIR FORCE BASE, Del. — The hangar was relatively empty. Not even the Lockheed Martin C-5, some 250 feet long and 65 feet high, filled the space outright.
No maintainers milled about, no drills whirred and no hammers clanged. However the regular hum of spinning blades echoed through the chamber at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, as a drone autonomously maneuvered across the transport aircraft.
Its movement, aided by digital models and crash-avoidance capabilities, was punctuated by occasional hovering because it stabilized to capture with a high-resolution camera photos of the plane’s exterior. The pictures then flashed onto a close-by display, with potential issues organized for expert review.
“That is what young technicians live within the Department of Defense, the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, whoever it could be,” Scott Belanger, a Boeing executive, told reporters gathered at the bottom Jan. 23. “That is their environment, where they’re charged with generating aircraft, just like the C-5 here, which might be old and hard to maintain on the flight line.”
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Last week marked the primary time Boeing and small-business partner Near Earth Autonomy cataloged a C-5 for his or her Autonomous Aircraft Inspection project. By feeding photos snapped by an unmanned aerial system through automated damage-detecting software after which uploading the outcomes right into a secure database accessible internationally, the 2 firms hope to slash the time it takes to judge and repair aircraft, ultimately boosting Air Force readiness.
While Boeing and Near Earth Autonomy have worked together for months previously, assessing and digitally archiving the status of Boeing C-17 cargo planes at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, the work on the East Coast marks “an enormous moment” for the AAI initiative, in response to Belanger.
Not only did it push Boeing outside its own portfolio — handling an aircraft made by competitor Lockheed — however the work itself was executed in conditions unlike Hawaii.
“You simply can’t do these things in a simulated environment. You’ve got to have an airplane, got to have a hanger, … got to get a bit of bit dirty and dive in to effectively do that,” Belanger said. “There are only a few hangers in the USA where you may park a C-5 inside. There just aren’t lots of these.”
Dover Air Force Base is home to each C-17 and C-5 aircraft. Traditional inspections counting on trained crews can take hours, with harnessing and clambering required. (A ladder within the tail of a C-5 brings airmen to a six-story perch.) The 34-point review conducted Jan. 23 via drone took roughly 10 minutes.
Looking ahead
Because the Defense Department prepares for potential fights within the Indo-Pacific and Europe, the Air Force is pursuing what’s often known as Agile Combat Employment. The ACE concept envisions a hub-and-spoke layout of bases — some larger and stuck, some smaller and mobile — that may scatter supplies, manpower and knowhow.
Only two persons are needed to run the Automated Aircraft Inspection, and training takes a couple of hours. The method helps overcome the tedium related to conventional assay, in response to Ken Jones, an Air Force maintenance official.
“That is best, because what we’ve got to do with our system is definitely exit after which review the imagery and search for things,” he told reporters. “Their artificial intelligence is drawing little boxes across the things that the pc thinks, ‘This isn’t what it’s imagined to be.’”
The drone-and-software combo deployed at Dover Air Force Base discovered missing paint, chips and other possible irregularities. Reporters observed the review process, wherein experts quickly sorted the pictures and flagged what needed fixing.
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“It’s pretty easy to give you the option to do this,” Jones said. “Should you’re working over a 12 months’s time, we may very well be talking about saving per week or two, and, on top of that, is the security thing. We’re definitely serious about the time, and we’re definitely serious about the standard of the product of the inspection.”
For future examinations, Boeing and Near Earth Autonomy are eyeing additional drone payloads, to potentially catch subsurface damage, and are moving the drone outdoors, requiring weatherization upgrades to the hardware. Boeing, the fifth largest contractor on the planet when ranked by defense-related revenue, committed to getting the UAS operating outside inside the following 12 months and a half.
Additional aircraft could also join the inspection roster. Near-term candidates include the KC-135 and KC-46 tankers. Each are made by Boeing.
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 day by day newspaper in South Carolina. Colin can also be an award-winning photographer.