Monarch Aircraft Engineering goes for XL Go from GE
07/07/2011
After a comprehensive eighteen month appraisal of the relevant technology currently available, Monarch Aircraft Engineering Ltd (MAEL) has selected XL Go and XL Vu portable video borescopes from the Inspection Technologies business of GE Energy’s Measurement & Control Solutions to meet its future remote visual inspection (RVI) needs. The truly portable instruments will be widely used by MAEL for tasks ranging from on-wing inspection to engine health monitoring.Based at London Luton airport, MAEL is a sister company to Monarch Airlines and provides base maintenance, line maintenance, engineering and technical support, aircraft engine services and technical training. Base maintenance, including heavy ‘D’ checks, is carried out at MAEL’s hangar facilities at Luton and Manchester International airports, with line maintenance facilities at locations including London Gatwick, Malaga, Kiev, Goa and the Maldives. The company has extensive maintenance experience on a wide range of Boeing and Airbus aircraft.
Remote visual inspection is a very important inspection tool and is used to carry out simple examinations behind panels as well as full front-to-back inspection of each stage of a jet engine. As Lee Burgess, Head of Maintenance Control and Capacity Planning at MAEL, explains: “For Monarch Airlines alone we can carry out in excess of 340 borescope inspections every year, as well as performing inspections for other airlines throughout the world. We have been using our previous trolley-mounted equipment for the past eight years and we believe we have taken a huge technological leap forward with the purchase of the new next-generation XL Go and XL Vu instruments. Their portability, ease of use and enhanced functionality will make remote inspections quicker and easier, while providing more accurate results.”
XL Go and XL Vu are both lightweight high-resolution video borescopes with intuitive, easy-to-use controls. They are totally self-contained, requiring no cable connection to any associated processing or drive instrument and feature a navigable insertion tube with 360 degree articulation for greater flexibility of inspection. The XL Go has added functionality with exclusive measurement features, including ShadowProbe® and StereoProbe®. Inverse and zoom features allow precise cursor placement and optical camera tip adapters alter field of view, depth of field and direction of view.
Burgess adds: “The successful trials of the new instruments demonstrated their ease of use, which has helped a lot in training our technicians, while the portability is extremely important both during inspection itself and also for transport to line maintenance sites. We believe that our investment in the GE technology will see a significant reduction in our on-going repair costs, as well as allowing us to market ourselves more widely as a borescope solution provider.”
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