Honeywell 's SAM

Beauty may prove to be only skin deep once Honeywell's SAM is unleashed on your favorite business jet.

For SAM can see through the gloss to flaws within, discovering cracks and corrosion in metal and debonding and delamination in composites, flaws that quietly lurk in wait of a structural failure.

SAM is, in effect, the first CAT-scan for bizjets. Its robotic sensors can inspect and diagnose an airplane overnight, without taking it out of regular service.

"SAM stands for Structural Anomaly Mapping," explained Bernd Kessler, vp and general manager of Honeywell Aftermarket Services. And yes, it could have detected the sort of delamination found in the composite fin of the American Airlines Airbus A300-600 that crashed in New York in November 2001, he believes.

But SAM wasn't in service then-indeed, it still is not. The sole SAM proof-of-concept demonstrator is currently being tested in Baltimore on Honeywell's own business jets, and will later be moved to Phoenix while production plans are drawn up.

"This really is the launch here at NBAA," Kessler told Show News.

Honeywell has joined forces with BBA Diagnostics (BBAD) of the United Kingdom to jointly develop and market SAM for many applications including business, military and commercial aircraft. BBAD is itself a joint venture between BBA Aviation Services Group and Advanced Power Technologies (APTI). BBA is the owner of the Signature Flight Support chain of FBOs as well as Dallas Airmotive and numerous other maintenance and overhaul companies. Their goal is to develop real-time imaging technology to identify and track indications of anomalies in aircraft structures.

SAM can be programmed to inspect a Gulfstream V-size aircraft in 10 to 12 hours, moving all around it and examining every part to create a 3-D digital image with sensors that include a low frequency acoustic source and a laser vibrometer. Or it can examine a particular area. By moving above and below SAM can penetrate as much as 12 inches into the structure without damaging the surface, and without any special surface treatment.

This is a massive advance over today's enormously time consuming X-ray, ultrasound and other non-destructive examination techniques that still include tapping a coin on the airframe to see if it rings true, said Kessler. Results from these tests are open to interpretation by the engineer, in contrast to the extremely accurate picture built by SAM, he added.

With SAM, an airplane can be inspected quickly once a year and its 3-D records compared both to previous years and to similar models in the fleet. In this way cracks and corrosion can be detected well ahead of the time they pose a risk. This form of trend monitoring could hasten the arrival of power by the hour contracts for a complete aircraft, Kessler believes.

While SAM can get around the hangar himself, the system is not readily transportable from one site to another. And it is not likely to be cheap, either. Honeywell is currently working on "innovative and creative" ways to allow companies to buy, lease, operate or access SAMs once they become available by mid-2003.

By John Morris