“If you look at how long we would like our destroyers and our aircraft carriers and our fighter jets and all of it to go through a normal maintenance cycle, we’d like it to be a certain period of time. Very often, it goes beyond that, and it goes beyond that because we don’t have enough workers, or there’s too much of a backlog, or demand has consistently been too high,” Costa, who is now with the Atlantic Council, said. “What’s happening here is that we’re just adding to that backlog.”

There are three Air Force maintenance depots in the United States, known as air logistics complexes: Ogden ALC at Hill Air Force Base in Utah; Oklahoma City ALC at Tinker AFB in Oklahoma; and Warner Robins ALC at Robins AFB in Georgia. These facilities maintain the aircraft that the service relies on, including the F-16, F-35, KC-135, and C-130, and more.

A growing challenge

A recent Government Accountability Office report found that the percentage of aircraft maintenance that ran into delays based on their original target dates more than doubled over a five-year period. In fiscal 2019, 31% of aircraft maintenance ran into delays, which jumped all the way up to 73% in fiscal 2024. Aircraft undergoing maintenance will often be given a revised target date once inspectors get a better understanding of what’s required. In fiscal 2019, 19% of aircraft were delayed beyond their revised target date, while that grew to 34% of aircraft in fiscal 2024. 

The three ALCs have taken steps in recent years to rectify staffing shortages, which were brought on by a confluence of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, retirements, and resignations, according to the GAO report. They reported struggling to compete for engineers and mechanics with offers from the private sector that often can mean higher salaries, hourly wages, and bonuses. 

“One of those challenges, among many, is that we’ve heard in different venues and in different forums about not necessarily having enough trained maintainers to do what they need to do, and that’s both on the flight line, and that’s also at the depots. So, this move towards exploring the use of drones and robotics as a new tool in their tool kit to help address sustainment and maintenance challenges is something that’s certainly worth exploring, and it may prove helpful,” Diana Maurer, the director in the GAO’s Defense Capabilities and Management team, told the Washington Examiner. “Now, obviously, the proof is going to be in the pudding.”

How DroneDogs can help

Under this agreement, Asylon will deploy its Guardian small drone and DroneDog Q-UGV, operating with the company’s Range autonomy stack, which will help the robots navigate indoor hangar environments, and with their DroneIQ command-and-control and data visualization software. By working together, the DroneDog will scan the bottom part of an aircraft, such as underneath the wings and belly, while the small drone will do the top side of said aircraft. That data will then be merged into one platform, and airmen can decide how to proceed with potential repairs.

“The idea is that instead of needing to build up scaffolding and all this other infrastructure to get airmen up on top of the C-5 and the T-tails and everything, which is a safety concern, that we actually use the robots in tandem to take all of the data that usually an airman would be doing by hand,” Damon Henry, the CEO and co-founder of Asylon told the Washington Examiner. “The goal is to automate the data collection piece, essentially.”

The drones will be scanning the aircraft for things visible to the naked eye, such as loose fasteners, dings, dents, signs of corrosion, chipped paint, and anything that could cause damage to the aircraft while in flight.

Only one Guardian drone and one DroneDog are needed to scan an entire aircraft, Henry added, noting ongoing conversations about possible increases.

The company’s goal is for both drones to complete a “full aircraft inspection in a matter of hours,” he said. “I can’t speak directly to how long it takes people to do it today, but it’s definitely longer than that, on the order of days.”

Within a matter of years, the use of robotics and drones for scanning military systems could become much more commonplace and expand beyond just Air Force aircraft. The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps all have aircraft as well; it could become useful for commercial aircraft sustainment, and could include warship inspections, facilities inspections, and even building inspections, Henry said.

Iran war sparks urgency

Whenever the war in Iran ends, and the systems involved in the war return for maintenance, these facilities will be stretched even further.

The Air Force has lost or damaged more than 40 manned and unmanned aircraft, according to a Congressional Research Service report from May. Some have already been repaired and returned to service, while others were destroyed beyond repair.

The Air Force lost four F-15E fighter aircraft — three of which were shot down accidentally by Kuwait and one that Iran shot down that led to a desperate search and rescue operation for the pilots — lost an A-10 Thunderbolt II; damaged one F-35A Lightning II fighter aircraft; lost an E-3 sentry airborne early warning-and-control system aircraft; lost about two dozen MQ-9 reaper drones; and seven KC-135 stratotanker aerial refueling aircraft sustained damage or were destroyed. 

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“Repairs of any kind take time and cost money and resources, and battle damage repairs in particular can be especially time-consuming and especially costly because of the nature of the damage,” Maurer added. “This kind of tool of using [artificial intelligence] and drones and robotics could, at some point, be helpful with that. But I could leave that in the Air Force’s realm in terms of: Do you want to try out something new and innovative like this on what could be a critical need to turn those systems around very quickly?”

Nearly half of the Air Force fleet is over 40 years old, while more than 60% of aircraft are over 30 years old.