Miscellaneous
The damage you cannot see on a composite airframe
Modern aircraft are built from composite materials, on which damage is genuinely hard to see. Incident history shows that even minor infractions can severely affect the integrity of the structure once it is pressurised.
Aug 11, 2026
2 min read
The inspection that has to catch what the eye cannot
General visual inspection during A, B and C checks depends on trained engineers examining a very large exterior surface for damage that composite materials are good at concealing. The consequence of a miss is not a warranty claim. It is also an inspection that has to be repeatable. Judging whether a mark has grown since the last check requires the last check to have been performed the same way — which manual inspection cannot guarantee.The solution: vertically hung concave rigs, nose to tail
- Bespoke rig geometry: Vertically hung concave rigs carrying high-end machine vision cameras and controlled lighting capture the aircraft’s exterior surface and its MSN.
- Complete coverage: Precise capture from the nose of the aircraft to the tail wing enables reliable damage mapping across the entire exterior.
- Edge processing: Images are processed in real time and sent to a GPU at the edge to process damage, so results are not waiting on a round trip to a data centre.
- Automated reporting: At the end of the maintenance inspection, a comprehensive report is generated and sent for general visual inspection.
- Centralised management: Image processing, analytics and control functions are remotely configurable across sites.
What it produces
- Roughly ten times faster inspection, with a correspondingly higher impact on reducing losses.
- Detection beyond human capability. The system consistently detects damage the human eye does not notice, and is constantly learning and improving.
- Objective comparison over time. Because every capture is performed identically, aircraft status can be compared between checks rather than re-assessed from scratch each time.
- A comprehensive visual audit trail for every aircraft inspection — usable for everything from MRO planning to post-incident investigation.
