Aerospace Maintenance (MRO)

Aircraft maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) is about ensuring that aircraft are safe to fly. MRO operations involve regularly scheduled line and base maintenance activities, including structural inspection tasks.

Whether the aircraft is a traditional metal structure or the latest generation of jetliner made from composite materials, airlines and operators must perform these tasks to prevent and detect structural damage, dents, cracks, and corrosion defects.

Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence’s 3D scanning solutions can help operators quickly inspect aircraft structural surfaces such as the engine air inlet, nacelle panels, fan blades or wing slat leading edges, all of which are exposed to lightning, ice and bird strikes.

Ground maintenance team mechanics use our ergonomic handheld 3D scanners to quickly detect and evaluate damage, while engine repair and overhaul maintenance facilities use our automated coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) to identify defects on larger batches of parts like engine blades and casings.

Accurate 3D measurement data also gives MRO teams the option to reverse engineer replacement parts to make repairs. This is particularly important when the part’s CAD models are not available; reverse engineering from rich point cloud data is often the quickest way to remanufacture the component, and our CAD CAM solutions can support toolpath creation from the scan data.

Hexagon is also helping aircraft MRO teams to reduce the aircraft downtimes by providing digital data collection and management tools that help them shift from preventive to predictive maintenance. Our data analytics and simulation solutions can aid MRO by recording and analysing structural inspection results to optimise maintenance tasks, enabling airlines to bring aircraft back into service in the shortest possible time.