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EasyJet Turning To Drones For Aircraft Inspections
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."
With sufficient resolution (as TFA points out) and the ability to finely control the drones this could be a good thing since you could hover near and area and get a closer look; and then do a normal inspection if you still have questions.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
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.
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.
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.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
... fly the drone within 5 miles of the airport.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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.
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.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Only for Americans if they get work visas. EasyJet don't fly to the Americas.
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.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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 Wikipedia article neither did the NTSB.
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.
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.