Comparison of Visual and Visual–Tactile Inspection of Aircraft Engine Blades

Background—In aircraft engine maintenance, the majority of parts, including engine blades, are inspected visually for any damage to ensure a safe operation. While this process is called visual inspection, there are other human senses encompassed in this process such as tactile perception. Thus, there is a need to better understand the effect of the tactile component on visual inspection performance and whether this effect is consistent for different defect types and expertise groups. Method—This study comprised three experiments, each designed to test different levels of visual and tactile abilities. In each experiment, six industry practitioners of three expertise groups inspected the same sample of N = 26 blades. A two-week interval was allowed between the experiments. Inspection performance was measured in terms of inspection accuracy, inspection time, and defect classification accuracy. Results—The results showed that unrestrained vision and the addition of tactile perception led to higher inspection accuracies of 76.9% and 84.0%, respectively, compared to screen-based inspection with 70.5% accuracy. An improvement was also noted in classification accuracy, as 39.1%, 67.5%, and 79.4% of defects were correctly classified in screen-based, full vision and visual–tactile inspection, respectively. The shortest inspection time was measured for screen-based inspection (18.134 s) followed by visual–tactile (22.140 s) and full vision (25.064 s). Dents benefited the most from the tactile sense, while the false positive rate remained unchanged across all experiments. Nicks and dents were the most difficult to detect and classify and were often confused by operators. Conclusions—Visual inspection in combination with tactile perception led to better performance in inspecting engine blades than visual inspection alone. This has implications for industrial training programmes for fault detection.