Inspecting an aircraft is a labor-intensive endeavor. It can take up to 15 hours or longer for crews to inspect a plane for routine maintenance, and requires workers to climb stairs or ride cherry pickers at tall heights to evaluate aircraft for things like lightning strikes.
But with Dutch startup Mainblades, which uses smart drones for aircraft maintenance, crews can inspect planes in less than two hours – providing a much more efficient and safer method to evaluate aircraft.
Founded in 2017, Mainblades set out to automate the visual inspections of aircraft using drones. It landed an early customer in Netherlands airline KLM, and counts Delta, Lufthansa Technik and others among its customers.
The startup’s venture investors include TechNexus Venture Collaborative.
Delta just this month announced the FAA accepted its plan to use drones for maintenance inspections, which are powered by Mainblades, making it the first U.S. commercial operator to receive FAA approval to use drones for maintenance inspections.
For customers like Delta, Mainblades provides the drones and software to automate inspections. Users just press a few buttons on an iPad and the drone begins its inspection process, Mainblades CEO Dejan Borata said. The drone provides a general inspection of the aircraft, taking photos that a human inspector can review later. These smart inspection drones can detect damage to a plane, and are particularly useful in identifying when lightning has struck an aircraft.
“People are able to save a lot of time on these inspections,” he said. “They're able to increase consistency. They're able to have fewer engineers and mechanics go at heights where falls can happen.”
Delta has brought the drone technology to its entire mainline fleet, starting with visual inspections following lightning strikes. It even named its drones Reba and Dolly, Delta Chief of Operations John Laughter said in a LinkedIn post.
“Our two drones take hundreds of photos that our technicians can use to aid in analyzing potential aircraft damage, which also helps reduce the number of inspections our people do at heights and ensures we return the aircraft to service safely and more efficiently,” Laughter said.
Mainblades is exploring other industries, like aerospace, that could benefit from AI drone inspection. The company is currently working with a yet-to-be-named aerospace firm, testing its drone maintenance on rockets.
“Aviation and aerospace are very related,” Dejan said. “Rocket inspection is not as big of an industry in terms of number of assets, but it is something that is going to be heavily growing in the coming years.”
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