EasyJet Turning To Drones For Aircraft Inspections 60
itwbennett writes: Would you trust your aircraft inspection to a drone? Budget airline easyJet is testing just such a system, aimed at reducing the amount of time an aircraft is out of service. Instead of having humans perform on-site visual inspections, the drone will "fly around an aircraft snapping images, which will then be fed to engineers for analysis."
Take pictures and look at them later (Score:2)
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> Unless the drone can get the pictures faster than a person
Of course it can. An aircraft is big. And tall.
You can have a million ladders and platforms that need to be moved around to get people into all those hard to reach places, or you can have a drone fly up there to snap a pic.
Re:Take pictures and look at them later (Score:5, Insightful)
This could be done with a handheld camera as well.
No. It could be done with a handheld camera, plus some platforms and safety harnesses, and plenty of extra hours of work. Inspecting the tail fins, and the top of the fuselage is far easier, quicker, and cheaper with a drone.
Re:Take pictures and look at them later (Score:4, Informative)
Only for Americans if they get work visas. EasyJet don't fly to the Americas.
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>No. It could be done with a handheld camera, plus some platforms and safety harnesses, and plenty of extra hours of work. Inspecting the tail fins, and the top of the fuselage is far easier, quicker, and cheaper with a drone.
Hear that? The sound a $300 drone makes when crashing into a $50,000 piece of equipment. It might be quicker with a drone, but it's def. not cheaper.
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The sound a $300 drone makes when crashing into a $50,000 piece of equipment.
These little camera drones are made of lightweight plastic and Styrofoam. They weight a few hundred grams. They move slowly. They are unlikely to damage anything, not even scratching the paint.
Not really what you should be worried about (Score:2)
Inspecting the tail fins, and the top of the fuselage is far easier, quicker, and cheaper with a drone.
I agree that it might be easier, quicker and cheaper with a drone. However I don't really care. As a passenger I'm far more interested in whether it is just as effective as spotting problems as the human eyeballs it replaces. On the plus side images can be zoomed and you might see more detail than a human eye. On the downside the image is probably not going to be 3D and it sounds like the person taking the pictures with the drone will not be the engineer who inspects them.
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The massive plus point is that the images can be stored for later analysis in situations where there is a suspicion that something was missed or glossed over.
Re:Not really what you should be worried about (Score:5, Interesting)
Even better than that you could have the drone fly a preplanned route around the plane capturing every square centimetre and then have a computer compare the imagery with the results from last week/month/year and flag up any differences for the engineer to actually look at.
Add in some imaging in wavelengths other than visible light, not only could this be quicker and cheaper than a manual human inspection it could also be better.
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And a drone won't know if the lighting is good or if the wrong part of the pic is blurred. Will the quality of the photos be high enough to zoom in if needed? ... having read the article, the answer is no - the pictures are not of high enough quality, the system is still in the design stages...
And what happens if the engineer is not happy with the
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And a drone won't know if the lighting is good or if the wrong part of the pic is blurred.
Why not? Either of those can be detected by algorithmic image analysis.
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Inspecting the tail fins, and the top of the fuselage is far easier, quicker, and cheaper with a drone.
I agree that it might be easier, quicker and cheaper with a drone. However I don't really care. As a passenger I'm far more interested in whether it is just as effective as spotting problems as the human eyeballs it replaces. On the plus side images can be zoomed and you might see more detail than a human eye. On the downside the image is probably not going to be 3D and it sounds like the person taking the pictures with the drone will not be the engineer who inspects them.
It could probably be more effective since you could run a standard visual analysis run, then make another pass with IR/X-Ray/etc filters to check for defects that the human eye can't see, of course that's assuming you couldn't load the drone to do them all at the same time.
In fact, this kind of thing will probably be very beneficial to airlines running next-gen technologies like Carbon Fibre body/wings (e.g Boeing 787) as you need these kinds of analysis to see the problems long before they're visually a
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Interesting idea with potential (Score:5, Insightful)
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Saves having to climb a ladder (Score:2)
Re:Saves having to climb a ladder (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't work for easyJet. However, I do work in the aviation sector. EasyJet have a phenomenal safety culture and are among the safest airlines in the world. I see this article as evidence that they are investing money in improving their safety practices.
Almost every first-world airline knows that safety is an area where you don't cut corners. If you're not a state-owned flag-carrier, then a single crash can (and probably will) wipe out your whole business. This goes for the low cost carriers as much as for the legacy airlines.
Your prediction is bollocks, pure and simple.
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Exactly. Now I want you to imaging which of these engineers is paying the most attention to what is in front of them. The engineer in a ice comfy office with high resolution screens drinking their coffee looking at high res photos or the engineer on a ladder in the sleet with that first drop of freezing cold water running down their back and into their arse crack?
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or the engineer on a ladder in the sleet
They aren't rolled into hangars for inspection? After all, snow and rain make it really hard to detect small cracks.
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There is that of course. I'll just go with it being cold in a really really big shed then.
In my mind I had them doing the drone fly overs more regularly that a normal inspection. No idea why I thought that though.
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Almost every first-world airline knows that safety is an area where you don't cut corners.
True, but only because so many already have and paid the price.
American Airlines Flight 191 [wikipedia.org]
United Airlines Flight 232 [wikipedia.org]
Alaska Airlines Flight 261 [wikipedia.org]
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AA 191 isn't the best example to cite here.
While it's true that bad maintenance procedures led to the failure, the crash would have been avoidable if the pilot or FO had reacted correctly. Instead of increasing the throttle position of the remaining engines and using it to get the plane to where it could land safely, however, he reduced throttle and stalled out.
Maintenance caused the failure, but it was unquestionably pilot error that caused the crash.
No Pilot Error (Score:3)
Maintenance caused the failure, but it was unquestionably pilot error that caused the crash.
Actually not according to the linked article. The pilots followed the correct procedure which was a slow climb with flaps open but the engine falling off the wing severed the hydraulic lines and caused a partial power failure which meant that the slats retracted on the one wing and the warning indicators both for stall and asymmetric slats did not work. The crash might have been avoidable given hindsight but I would not call it pilot error by any stretch of the imagination and again according to the Wikipe
Re:Saves having to climb a ladder (Score:4, Interesting)
In the world of psychopathic corporate finance it is not 'bollocks' and is the norm. Company with solid repuation and high trust are routinely bought by vulture capitalists who pay too much for them and then who strip away all those costs associated with those activities that earned those companies their reputation and trust. The temporary surge in profits is then used to dress up the company for sale at a profit before the consequences of the profit pumping decisions come to light. So the on sold now unreliable and not trustworthy company than collapse as it's reputation collapses and the vulture capitalist strolls off with the profits. Mitt Romney was a specialist at this and destroyed many a company, many jobs and crippled many pension funds but of course he is a conservative hero for doing so.
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This article is a little late to the party (like, over a year) and misses some of the cool tech on board those drones (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27308232).
FYI I used to work for easyJet (IT side) and they DO NOT FUCK WITH SAFETY The tech guys are damn good at what they do and what they say goes.
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Why Stop At Cameras? Go 3D! (Score:2)
If I can build a rudimentary 3D scanner with decent resolution out of a cheap laser pointer, a wine glass, and a 480px resolution webcam, surely a fleet of expensive drones sporting modern, HD cameras could do the same thing a few orders of magnitude more efficiently.
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Melodrama (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody's leaving aircraft inspection to the drones. They're just a tool like any other. As long as there's no question that the images reviewed are of the right aircraft (no spoofing, please), I think it's really no different from using a 20 meter selfie stick to take the pictures.
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I think it's really no different from using a 20 meter selfie stick to take the pictures.
And I thought the only legitimate use for a selfie stick was as a lightening conductor!
As long as they don't ... (Score:4, Funny)
... fly the drone within 5 miles of the airport.
FTFY (Score:2)
fly the drone within 5 miles of the airport without authorization from the tower.
From tfa (Score:4, Funny)
Would you trust your aircraft inspection to a drone?
Never trust a drone, man.
I learned that the hard way. I loaned one $20 and it just flew away with my money.
Drone on (Score:2)
Sure (Score:2)
A quadcopter can fly a route that is preprogrammed for each type of airframe. As long as it is able to index off a defined point for each aircraft, it should be able to fly to each key inspection area and take exactly the same photo from exactly the same angle every time. Those photos can then be processed by computer to compare differences between thousands of nearly identical samples to determine a variance metric, which can help a human worker prioritize the images for review and referral to a ground ins
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Or even what has changed on this aircraft since I last flew over it.
"Inspection Tool" vs. "Drone" (Score:3)
Failures due to lack of inspection because the inspection activity is a PITA is a hard nut for engineers to crack. Big aircraft have hard-to-reach spots that require ladders and man-lifts to access. It just takes one lazy technician to skip an inspection to miss a flaw that leads to a failure.
This could be a good idea if it facilitates inspection of parts of the aircraft that are normally difficult to access (e.g. boroscopes for engine inspections is a similar idea). The top of a T-tail aircraft that would require a man-lift and some time to inspect something that is quickly and plainly visible once you are in position - this would be a perfect application of a quadcopter with a camera (fuck off with the "drone" meme, please. It's an RC copter with a GoPro).
If it makes it easier (and maybe fun) to do the right thing, cool. It sounds childish, but if you can make a critical job easy and fun, you increase the chances that the job gets done enormously. Some (not many) engineers think to design things in this way.
I see nothing wrong with this (Score:2)
Assuming the cameras are sufficient resolution to capture the small defects before they become larger defects (or cause a failure) and assuming there is still a way to a human to get up there and look at something if the photos aren't clear enough and there are still questions, I see no problem with this.
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Because a photo can't capture what a human can see, use intuition, and inspect further.
A photo sent to some bored engineer isn't going to cut it, it creates at minimum 2 levels of non involvement.
What could possibly go wrong? (Score:1)
Drone sucked into the jet's intake?
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Maybe I should have read TFA first ..... :(
Bad news (Score:1)
More job reduction, lower performance by drones.
Maybe (Score:2)
I was under the impression that lots of stuff that needed inspecting lay behind some sort of access panel. Or in some location not easy to get to. I don't think a drone will be much help for this sort of thing.
On the other hand, prior to flight, it is necessary to do a 'walk around' of the aircraft looking for problems like fluid leaks, access covers inadvertently left open, locking pins left in place and other similar items. Customarily, this is done by the flight crew. But a drone might be able to get a