Vol. 52 No. 1 (2015)   New Products & Technologies
Technical Papers

Cost Reduction Technology for Airframe Maintenance

TAKASHI YARI
NOZOMI SAITO
KAZUO HOTATE
SATOSHI MATSUURA
ENOMOTO KIYOSHI

Recently, aircraft structures adopt a damage tolerance design and its airworthiness is maintained through the periodical inspections specified in the maintenance plan before it becomes fatal. The establishment of health monitoring technology to continuously monitor the condition and airworthiness of an aircraft structure will hopefully lengthen the present inspection intervals and reduce maintenance costs, thereby improving the efficiency of aircraft operation. The authors developed an optical fiber sensor-based system for wide-area diagnosis of aircraft structures and evaluated its applicability to adopt structure condition monitoring through flight demonstration testing. It was found that the developed system can monitor the structural condition during flight operation.