Do you recognise this? A few days before each lease transition check you start having nightmares again. From dents and scratches to cracks and buckles, assessing damage and compiling accurate reports is a challenging and time-consuming task. Yet, it is fundamental to ensure the aircraft’s airworthiness.

What if you could make this process a bit smoother?

The struggle of damage reporting

At Mainblades we recognized that damage mapping using traditional methods is inconsistent and prone to error. As it happens with aircraft inspections, generating a dent and buckle chart is a human-dependent procedure, which contributes to the subjectivity of the results. The engineer needs to be accurate in his work, identifying and reporting deviations, which can become a problem when he is tired or under time pressure. Some of the biggest challenges that may lead to missing damages include:

• Limited resources (hand-written notes and phone-taken pictures) available for report generation.  
• Inexistent standard format for the dent-and-buckle chart.  
• Difficulty in comparing the recently found deviations with the existing documentation.  

Focus on what really matters

Forget cherry pickers because our drone inspection solution paired with our iPad application relieves aircraft engineers of these struggles. It can be used to perform automated visual aircraft inspections both indoor and outdoor and helps you go toward a paperless process, providing digital reports with precise location of all defects. With the inspection time slashed to minutes and damage assessment being more reliable, faster and informed decisions can be made with regards to aircraft repair and availability.

Our iPad application also gives you easy access to past inspections as all data and reports are stored on a cloud platform. This allows engineers to focus on their true expertise: analysing defects and making informed decisions on the maintenance tasks to be performed.

Fast, safe and easy

Our iPad application includes a dent-and-buckle feature which allows to record and review all structural damages on the outside of the aircraft in a much more reliable way. It is part of the Onboard Documentation and kept in the aircraft cockpit. The dent-and-buckle chart marks the location of the aircraft damage with a number on 2D pictures. In an overview table, all damages are listed with its location, dimensions, and reference to approved data.

As the main source stating the presence and the location of external structural damages used by the flight or ground crew, the dent-and-buckle chart should be enclosed and maintained in an Aircraft Technical Log Book on board retainer. It needs to be reliable and accurate. Our solution ensures exactly that. From data collection to report generation, the process of visual aircraft inspections has never been easier, faster and safer

3 reasons why you need a dent and buckle chart

• Operational efficiency: In today’s competitive environment, the need to increase aircraft availability while improving visual inspections and reducing operating costs is fundamental not only for an airline but also for an MRO organization or a leasing company.  
• Data accuracy: A complete understanding of airframe reliability is the first line of defense for safety-related issues. It can only be achieved through accurate and proficient damage tracking from the first discovery to subsequent repair.  
• Regulation requirements: Aircraft damage assessment should comply with regulatory record-keeping requirements, which means that visual inspections should result in detailed SRM-compliant reports enabling anyone within your business to record, review, and track damage and repairs on aircraft.

‍