Four CV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft assigned to the 353rd Special Operations Group Detachment 1 fly above Tokyo, Japan, on April 5, 2018. Air Force photo by SrA. Joseph Pick.
LE BOURGET, France—Raytheon announced June 18 it is working with the V-22 joint program office to use a new artificial intelligence capability to predict when repairs are needed on Osprey radars.
The Air Force and Raytheon began working on the capability as a pilot program in late 2018, and they are now testing the concept with the goal to improve CV-22 readiness beginning in 2020, according to a company release.
The tool can help the Air Force get in front of problems that can occur with Osprey radars by “feeding in years of maintenance data into a system that has an overlay of AI and be able to basically predict what’s going to happen and when, so you get out in front of real problems,” Dave Wajsgras, Raytheon’s president of Intelligence, Information, and Services, during an interview at the Paris Air Show.
This use of AI is similar to the way commercial airlines do predictive maintenance, a model the Air Force has said it wants to follow for maintaining aircraft.