Drones for maintenance: After autonomous C-5 scan, Boeing looks to ‘weatherizing’ UAVs to go outside

DOVER AIR FORCE BASE — The Air Force is teaming with Boeing to put autonomous technologies to the test, and a recent demonstration on a C-5 aircraft showed the promise of using drones to assist with aircraft maintenance. But now, the defense contracting giant needs to tackle its “biggest limitation” — making sure the drones actually work in all weather conditions.

Inside of a relatively quiet hangar at Dover Air Force Base, Del. during a recent demonstration, a drone buzzed around about a quarter of a C-5, stopping to hover over different parts of the aircraft as it took pictures that were fed instantaneously to a ground control station just feet away. 

The demo was part of Boeing’s Autonomous Aircraft Inspection (AAI) program, a joint effort started a few years ago with autonomous aviation company Near Earth Autonomy, the two companies conducted the first drone scan of a C-5 aircraft to assist with maintenance inside of a hangar at Dover Air Force Base. 

“Well, right now we are operating indoors only, you know, because the drone that you see operating right now … it’s a prototype and so it’s not weatherized. … Boeing in partnership with [Near Earth Autonomy] this year is going to begin to invest in that to get the technology outside,” Scott Belanger, capabilities integration team lead for Boeing Global Services, told reporters during the Jan. 23 demonstration.

David Murphy, senior test pilot for Near Earth Autonomy, told reporters that “a vast majority of usefulness” for the program will be outside. But while Belanger said the “big limitation is getting outside,” the company has shown the AAI program works.

The ‘Crescendo Moment’

Officials from Boeing, Near Earth Autonomy and the Air Force watched as the drone moved through 34 locations on the plane, stopping to hover above the aircraft’s wing, next to the left side of the plane’s door and all the way up 65 feet in the air above its tail.

This is what Belanger described as the “crescendo moment” of the effort — a process that would normally involve multiple inspectors in safety harnesses with yellow ropes draped across the aircraft, who ultimately can’t see above the tail like the drone could. Belanger said that this typically “would take a crew an hour and a half just to get up there.”

“The best compliment we get from Air Force leadership when we show this, is when it lands here in a minute and someone goes, ‘is that it?’… It’s a very technical process, but we’ve refined it down to where it’s very accurate, simple and it’s predictable,” he said. 

After the inspection was complete, the drone slowly made its way back to the ground, taking just 10 to 15 minutes to scan a quarter of the almost 250-ft long aircraft — a timeline that is significantly less than it would take a safety check from a human and proved to be more accurate, Ken Jones, 436th Maintenance Group continuous process improvement director, said. 

“So when the airman goes up, he’s just looking, he’s not taking pictures,” Jones said. “So when he gets done, it’s what he saw. That’s what gets written up. But what we can do now with the drones that we currently have, we can fly and take the pictures and then analyze them and then keep them as a record so that we know if a flight comes back and then they say ‘well, is that something that the maintainer should have caught if a panel comes loose or whatever’, we can say ‘no, everything was intact before that flight.'”

The 34 inspection points for the drone to complete were derived from a flight plan made through computer aided design (essentially a 3D model of the aircraft) with the inspection requirement criteria from the Air Force.

After capturing images from an inspection point, the images were projected onto a ground control station and then to the cloud where damage classifications were made, Peter Rhodes, project manager for the AAI project, explained. 

Last November, Boeing officials told reporters that the idea behind AAI was to essentially digitize inspection workflow by using a drone to help technicians conduct routine maintenance checks. The company has already been testing the program at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii with C-17 aircraft with a drone made by Near Earth Autonomy and Boeing’s own software. 

That test recently showed an accuracy level of about 80 percent, Belanger claimed, up from about 78 percent he estimated last November. “So taking small but significant strides,” he said. 

Along with “weatherizing” the drone, Boeing is eyeing further investment to make the system available to fly with aircraft crew, Belanger said. And the plan is to extend the AAI program to other services like the Navy in the future.

“We’ve proven this works, we’ve proven the goodness,” Belanger said. “Now, where do we take it? How do we really scale it?”