Aging Aircraft NDE: Capabilities, Challenges, and Opportunities (Preprint)

U.S. Air Force aircraft are managed by Damage Tolerance Assessment (DTA) and Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE) plays a critical role in insuring their flight safety. This paper provides an overview of current NDE capabilities for aircraft structures. The potential migration to Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) will require NDE to evolve from detection of defects to characterization of their location and size. This represents multiple significant challenges as aircraft have many material and geometry factors that complicate this analysis. This paper provides a strategy to resolve these factors.
The original document contains color images. All DTIC reproductions will be in black and white. Submitted for publication in the Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Review of Progress in Quantitative Nondestructive Evaluation (QNDE) Conference 2006.