The U.S. Navy has started leveraging artificial intelligence and data analytics systems to track the health of aircraft components before said parts show signs of vulnerabilities, MeriTalk reported Thursday.
The service has equipped its aviation fleet with sensors to perform predictive maintenance on time-based components or parts of an aircraft that need to be maintained at certain intervals.
“We had very risk-averse maintenance intervals and time intervals on those dynamic components on our aircraft, that were all kind of dependent upon or predicated on the assumption that the aircraft was always flown in the most rigorous conditions possible,†said Roy Harris, director of aviation readiness and resource analysis at the Naval Air Systems Command.
He said using sensor data has provided NAVAIR an exact picture of how its aircraft were flown, as well as how to change maintenance intervals.Â
Harris added that his team in NAVAIR helped change the engineering community’s mindset in using AI to conduct maintenance operations on Naval aircraft.