Korean Air’s Aerospace Division is using a robot-arm ultrasonic scanning system to inspect the wings of the M-UAV, South Korea’s medium-altitude unmanned aerial vehicle for reconnaissance, according to a South Korean defense news video report. The company says a wing inspection that took one inspector about 30 days by hand can now be done by one operator in about two days, which should raise aircraft availability for the Republic of Korea Air Force.
The system, shown on screen as NDI COLDBOND, scans wings more than 10 meters long. NDI stands for non-destructive inspection. A robot arm moves the sensor along a pre-set path following the wing’s joint areas, using phased-array ultrasonic testing that covers a 64-millimeter-wide band per pass. Results are saved as digital images, replacing the earlier method in which an inspector read a waveform graph that appeared only while a hand-held probe touched the part.
Cho Inho, a manager in Korean Air’s Quality Management department, said manual scanning causes musculoskeletal strain and fatigue that make accuracy hard to maintain, and that stored images allow standardized review and improve reliability.
A graphic in the video says the U.S. military uses similar equipment on the RQ-4 unmanned reconnaissance aircraft but must install and move it by hand.
Development took about three years with an unnamed South Korean non-destructive testing company. Some steps remain manual, and Korean Air plans to add artificial intelligence to move toward fully unmanned inspection, with no schedule given.