Reliability of manual ultrasonic testing

Since the introduction of carbon reinforced fibre polymer (CRFP) into primary aircraft structure, there has been a renewed interest in portable devices for in-service inspection. It is foreseen that with less skilled NDT personnel, airlines need to perform more often unscheduled inspections. Such scanner devices are required to detect and characterise damage which may not be visible on the surface. This motivation can be attributed in part to the success of laboratory based ultrasonic immersion scanning systems for characterising defects in CRFP during material development and production. The extension of these methods to manual ultrasonic testing would offer immense advantages over incumbent methods where information available to the operator will be greatly enhanced by the production of multi-dimensional surface scans.