Aviateur

Inspiration

When Ryan flew back to Dallas from Baltimore, his flight got delayed for 12 hours and ultimately got canceled, requiring him to be on another flight and miss the Total Solar Eclipse that occurred in April 2024. The problem stems from a cabin interior bulb issue in the first-class cabin that required not 1 but 3 different engineers to travel on-site, and the issues were not resolved since it wasn't in any of the engineers' expertise.

Therefore, we want to make a web application that allows flight attendants or ground crews to create a 3D scan of the mechanical and electrical issues to enable American Airlines engineers everywhere to pre-diagnose and ensure that their expertise will be able to fix the problems promptly.

What it does

Our project, Aviateur, streamlines fleet management and airline maintenance by providing a suite of tools for aircraft incident response. This allows airline teams to move quickly when a plane is sitting on the tarmac and time is of the essence.

Aviateur upgrades maintenance reporting through a two-part system:

1. Mobile App for On-Site Staff

   • Allows flight attendants and ground crews to perform 3D scans of aircraft issues
   • Handles both minor problems (broken headrests, interior lights) and major concerns (exterior damage, engine issues)
   • Provides step-by-step scanning instructions
   • Automatically uploads scans to a central server

2. Web Platform for Engineers

   • Enables remote access to all submitted 3D scans
   • Engineers can review issues and provide immediate feedback
   • Staff can perform additional scans based on engineer requests
   • Features a comprehensive database of American Airlines fleet history
   • Maintains records of past scans and maintenance comments

This system creates a seamless communication channel between on-site staff and engineers, enabling faster and more accurate maintenance decisions.

How we built it

For the mobile app, we used Swift and RealityKit, which allow 3D scans on iPhone and iPad.

For the server, we used Express.JS to handle the 3D model uploaded, handling API calls for all American Airlines flight data.

For the web app, Next.JS was used for the front end and to display the 3D model.

Challenges we ran into

• Displaying the 3D render into the website
• Learning Swift, no one on the team used Swift before

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• The project almost working

What we learned

Learning about Augmented Reality and displaying the 3D scanned model on a web app.

What's next for Aviateur

Due to time constraints, we only focused on the feature we wanted to showcase, which is 3D scans, but we would like to make it so that flight attendants and ground crews can take pictures and videos.

We want to use Generative AI to understand the 3D scans and give the engineer a pre-analysis.

Built With

• augmented-reality
• express.js
• ios
• javascript
• next.js
• swift