Before a retired airliner is taken apart, its parts need a record. This is how RadianceView and an iPhone turn an aircraft into one: the whole airframe as a splat, the detail as photographs, every finding tied to where it was seen.
RadianceView is the inspection-grade visualization platform built by Laan Labs. It brings mobile 3D scans, traditional LiDAR, Gaussian splats and high-resolution photography together into a single visual record that opens in a browser. Teams use it to inspect, measure and report on an asset without being on site, with every finding tied to the place it was seen.
This case study shows the platform at work on retired airliners.
An airliner flies for twenty to thirty years. When it is retired it is still full of value: landing gear, doors, avionics, and tonnes of aerospace-grade sheet metal and composite panel.
There are three things that can happen to that material, in descending order of value:
Every part that moves up that list is a part that does not have to be made from new material. The obstacle is rarely the metal. It is the information.
To reuse or remanufacture a part, someone has to know what it is, where it sat in the aircraft, what it is made of and what condition it is in. After decades of maintenance, repair and modification, the aircraft on the apron no longer matches its drawings. And once dismantling starts, the evidence is gone. A panel on a pallet cannot tell you which frame it was fastened to.
So the aircraft has to be documented as it stands, before the first part comes off, and each part has to carry its record with it.
Laan Labs is providing capture and visualization for work on the reuse and remanufacturing of parts from end-of-life aircraft. Our part is the visual record: documenting retired airliners, inside and out, in a form that engineers who are not on site can inspect.
We did it with RadianceView, the inspection-grade visualization platform we built, and with two capture tools: a 3D scanner and an iPhone.
| 3D scanner | iPhone | |
|---|---|---|
| Captures | The whole asset in one pass | One section or one part at a time |
| Result | A Gaussian splat at true scale | Photographs at full camera resolution, each placed in 3D |
| Answers | Where is it? What is around it? | What is it? What condition is it in? |
| Who uses it | A capture specialist, on a planned visit | Anyone on the dismantling floor, at any time |
The scanner gives context. It records the airframe, the structure and the position of everything in it, and that record is what lets a remote engineer find their way around.
The iPhone gives evidence, and for part reuse that is the half that matters most.
It is already there. Dismantling takes weeks. A scanner visit captures the aircraft on one day. The phone is in a technician's pocket on every other day, including the moment a panel is unfastened and its hidden side is seen for the first time.
It resolves what a scan cannot. Each photo in our sets is 3024 x 4032 pixels. At that resolution the part markings stencilled on a skin panel can be read. Those markings are what tie a physical piece of metal to its record, and a part without an identity cannot be reused.
It knows where it was. The phone records its own position and orientation with every photo. In RadianceView each photograph appears at the point in space it was taken from, next to a 3D model of the section it shows. A photo is no longer "somewhere in the forward fuselage". It has a place.
It reaches. Behind a frame, inside a wheel well, up against the crown of the fuselage: a phone goes where a scanner on a tripod or a pole does not.
It needs no specialist. The person who knows the aircraft best is the one taking it apart. The capture app asks them to do what they already know how to do, which is take pictures.
It keeps the record current. The scan shows the aircraft on the day it was scanned. Phone captures added afterwards show what has changed since.
RadianceView takes both kinds of capture through the same five stages.
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| 01 Capture | 3D scanner for the whole asset, iPhone for the detail |
| 02 Process | Uploads are unpacked, converted and indexed with their camera positions |
| 03 Visualize | One photoreal reference at true scale, in a browser |
| 04 Analyze | Markers pinned in the splat, linked photo sets, measurements, AI inspection reports |
| 05 Report | One link to the record, with access control |
Six captures were uploaded in one day, the first and the last less than seven hours apart.
| Capture | Tool | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Exterior | 3D scanner | The whole airframe on the apron |
| Interior | 3D scanner | A fuselage stripped to its structure, flight deck to aft pressure bulkhead |
| Cabin interior | 3D scanner | A second aircraft with its cabin still fitted |
| Structure photo set | iPhone | 134 photos of a fuselage section, each placed in 3D |
| Landing gear detail | iPhone | Close-up sets of main gear |
Files never pass through the web server. The phone or the browser asks for a signed upload address and sends the data straight to cloud storage. Photo archives, the largest of them 614 MB, are unpacked on the server by streaming each entry from storage back into storage. Images are converted, thumbnailed and indexed with the position each one was taken from.
The exterior is one scene. You can look down on the airframe, drop to the apron and walk under the wing to the main gear. A collision mesh of about 306,000 triangles loads with the splat, so you stop at the fuselage instead of passing through it.
Inside, every frame, stringer and floor panel is visible. This is the material that remanufacturing is about, and it is on record in the state it was in before anything was removed.
The station markings painted on the frames are part of the scan and can be read in it. The second image below is a crop of the scene, not a photograph.
A splat shows where everything is. A photograph shows what condition it is in. RadianceView ties the two together, so an engineer can go from the whole aircraft to a single part marking without leaving the record.
Pin what matters. A marker is placed on a fuselage frame in the interior scan. It is saved with the scan, carries a title and a note, and links to the iPhone capture of that section.
Open the photo set. The iPhone capture opens as a model of the section with the photographs that produced it. Each small marker inside the model is the position the phone was in when a photo was taken. Select a marker and its photo is found in the strip below.
Inspect the original. Each photo opens at full resolution, which is where the part markings shown earlier are read.
Ask for a report. On any photo, an engineer can request an AI inspection report. A multimodal model describes what is in the image and lists findings with their location and severity, followed by recommendations. The prompt can be edited, the report can be corrected by the engineer, and the result is saved with the photo it describes.
Measure. Point-to-point distance and area are taken directly on the scene, in the splat viewer and in the photo set viewer. For remanufacturing that answers a practical question early: is this panel large enough to cut the new part from?
The output is a link. Each organization, project and capture can be private, unlisted or public, with an optional password, and visibility is inherited from organization to project to capture. The recipient opens a browser. There is nothing to install.
Every finding stays attached to the evidence it came from. A claim about a part that cannot be traced back to a photograph or a position on the aircraft is an opinion. One that can is a record, and a record is what a part needs to have a second life.
The same approach applies wherever an asset has to be understood before it is changed, and where the people deciding are not the people on site:
RadianceView is designed and built by Laan Labs, from the iPhone capture pipeline and upload API to the viewers and the analysis tools. It draws on our years of work in 3D capture, including 3D Scanner App. The approach is described in our earlier case study on Rapid Inspection and Documentation.
See the product at radianceview.com. To talk about an inspection or documentation project, contact us or email labs@laan.com.
Gaussian Splatting, LiDAR, iPhone capture, Multimodal LLMs, three.js, WebGL, SvelteKit, Firebase, Google Cloud Storage, RunPod
Aircraft are one of several kinds of asset documented with RadianceView, alongside galleries, buildings, stores and equipment. Read the other case studies on radianceview.com.
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