One common research focus for Lufthansa Technik and ZAL is the development of technology for digital inspection processes that can analyze damaged parts on-wing. Within a project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Eonomic Affairs and Climate Action (funding program LuFo VI-1), the project LeadPeen recently showed the potential of such a future inspection procedure in a real aviation environment.
In today’s aviation industry, the visual inspection of damages is still a mostly manual process, usually requiring highly skilled and trained experts for a large number of parts. In a time of personnel shortage, digitalization could help to speed up this process, and moreover harmonize it with consecutive processes like repair or piece part supply. It also has the potential to reduce the impact of personal or so called “human factors”.
To demonstrate the functionality of such inspection technology in the LeadPeen project, experts from Lufthansa Technik and ZAL trained a digital model for automated image recognition. Therein, even a very limited amount of photographs already achieved sufficient grades of recognition, rendering the technology basically suitable for industrial use.
Subsequent tests of the technology in a real aviation environment at the Lufthansa Technik base provided the proof of concept that specific inspection tasks, done manually in the shop today, could indeed be digitally aided this way in the not-too-distant future. First exemplary use cases could comprise various aircraft piece parts, potentially paving the way to (partially-) automated inspections.
Besides the aspect of time-saving in the inspection process itself, researchers in LeadPeen could also identify potential for digital consecutive processes, such as piece part supply and production, repair selection and knowledge management. The associated cost savings potential is estimated to be most significant when it is used to enable repairs on-wing, especially because the costly disassembly and transport of parts to maintenance, repair and overhaul facilities might then become obsolete.
