As aerospace maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) activity accelerates worldwide, repair vendors are racing to expand inspection capacity. Airlines are waiting longer for engines to return to service, OEMs are under pressure to increase repair throughput, and workshops are dealing with unpredictable component condition.
The instinctive industry response has been straightforward: buy more inspection equipment.
But according to Ben Anderson, Managing Director of Derby-based metrology specialist AddQual, that approach risks missing the real constraint in modern repair operations.
“When repair volumes increase, the first reaction from engineers is usually: let’s buy more CMMs, let’s add more scanners, let’s add more inspection equipment,” Anderson says. “But that doesn’t necessarily solve the real problem.”
Across many repair facilities, inspection technology itself is already highly capable. Coordinate measuring machines, optical scanners and advanced surface inspection systems can capture vast quantities of dimensional data with exceptional precision. Yet repair throughput often remains constrained.
The reason, Anderson argues, is not measurement speed but how that data is interpreted and turned into repair decisions.
“In MRO environments, a large proportion of parts that arrive for inspection ultimately fail tolerance limits or require significant intervention,” he explains. “But the decision that a part is non-viable often comes late in the process, after hours of inspection work. That’s where valuable capacity is lost.”
The challenge is becoming more visible as aerospace OEMs introduce increasingly sophisticated inspection technologies. One recent example comes from GE Aerospace, which has deployed robotic “white light” optical inspection systems capable of scanning complex turbine components with remarkable consistency and detail. The robots choreograph their movements around critical parts, capturing high-resolution data and building a digital record of surface conditions.
These technologies dramatically improve how quickly inspection data can be collected. But they also highlight a deeper issue within many repair operations: data alone does not automatically produce faster decisions.
“The industry has invested heavily in measurement technology over the past two decades,” Anderson says. “What hasn’t evolved at the same pace is the framework that converts that data into operational decisions.”
AddQual’s response to that challenge is MiDAS – the Metrology Interface DAShboard, a digital environment designed to structure how inspection data feeds repair planning, acceptance decisions and engineering dispositions.
Rather than adding another inspection device to the shop floor, MiDAS sits above existing measurement systems, capturing incoming part condition, monitoring inspection outcomes and linking them directly to operational metrics such as yield, turnaround time and repair viability.
The aim is to enable repair shops to identify viable components faster and reject non-repairable parts earlier, freeing inspection resources for work that actually generates value.
“It’s about creating a structured decision environment,” Anderson says. “You want to know very quickly: is this part repairable, is it marginal, or is it scrap? The faster you answer that question with confidence, the more capacity you unlock.”
The concept challenges a long-standing engineering mindset that equates productivity improvements with additional hardware investment.
Anderson draws a historical parallel.
“Henry Ford famously said that if he had asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” he notes. “Sometimes industries solve problems by simply scaling the tools they already know. But occasionally the answer is a completely different way of approaching the problem.”
For repair organisations facing record demand and constrained labour pools, that shift may be increasingly important. Highly skilled inspectors remain scarce, and training new technicians can take years. Simply multiplying inspection equipment does little to address the complexity of interpreting the results.
MiDAS attempts to tackle that challenge by embedding structured inspection workflows and traceable decision pathways into the repair process. The system standardises how inspections are executed and documented, helping reduce variation between technicians while creating a clear digital audit trail for OEM approvals.
In an industry where repair turnaround times can determine whether aircraft remain grounded or return to revenue service, the ability to accelerate repair decisions may prove as important as the ability to measure components quickly.
“MRO is under enormous pressure right now,” Anderson says. “The question isn’t just how fast you can measure a part. It’s how fast you can make the right decision about it.”
As repair demand continues to surge across the aerospace sector, the next wave of innovation may not come from adding more inspection machines—but from fundamentally rethinking how inspection data drives repair operations.
