Strike out

CHECKING an airliner’s wings and fuselage for damage after it has been hit by lightning or suffered a bird strike is more than just a time-consuming nuisance. In the cut-throat world of commercial aviation, time is money, and a plane in a hangar is a plane not earning its keep. At the moment, conducting such an inspection means employing engineers to stand on elevated mobile platforms so that they can pore over an affected aeroplane’s surface seeking out dents, holes or high-voltage skin burns which might be in need of repair. For an average plane, this takes about ten hours.

But that may soon change. In recent tests at Luton Airport, near London, a drone called Riser—the brainchild of Blue Bear Research Systems, a drone-builder based near the airport, and Createc, a sensing-and-imaging company in Cockermouth, in the north of England—completed equivalent surveys of an Airbus A320 belonging to EasyJet, a budget airline, in a mere 20 minutes.

Using a drone to look into a plane’s nooks and crannies makes sense, but there is a wrinkle. For obvious reasons, the authorities do not like robot aircraft flying around airports. Drones can therefore operate only inside hangars, and only when the doors are shut. Most drones, though, rely on the satellites of the Global Positioning System to know where they are, and GPS does not work well indoors.

Riser gets...

from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1CdpFf8