| An aircraft airframe is exposed to many forms of damage over its lifetime ranging from human error from design to operation to deterioration through age. Forms of damage can be attributed to different sources including design flaws, manufacturing flaws, aviation maintenance errors, exposure to weather, airframe stress caused by operational errors, and natural wear and tear. There is simple airframe damage resulting only in overhead costs, such as airframe exposure to runway pavement, and damage resulting in numerous fatalities such as American Airlines Flight 191. Flight 191 claimed the lives of over 279 onboard a DC-10 due to a fatigue crack in the left engine pylon assembly inadvertently caused during a routine maintenance inspection. In order to inspect aircraft for airframe structural damage many aircraft manufacturers mandate operators to perform a damage detection assessment through non-destructive testing (NDT). This process does not locate the damage automatically, but requires equipment - such as an ultrasound device manned by an expert - to check each section of an aircraft for damage. For this reason NDT is often time consuming and expensive. The future of detecting airframe structural damage system exists in the ability to automatically locate the airframe damage. This project is focused on developing software that can determine the location of airframe damage and researching methods to find the severity of the damage. |
