An aircraft can spend decades in service. During that time, paint changes. Fairings are removed and replaced. Fasteners are disturbed. Repairs are made. Damage appears. Components are changed. The airplane moves between owners, mechanics, hangars, and sometimes entirely different parts of the country. Its records travel with it. But those records rarely preserve exactly what the aircraft looked like at a particular moment in time. Logbooks document maintenance. Photographs ca

Most systems are assumed to become more visible as they progress. Activity increases. Information accumulates. Documentation expands. The expectation is that understanding improves with time. In practice, the opposite occurs. Before movement begins, the system is fully legible. Relationships are exposed. Boundaries are intact. Conditions exist without interference. Nothing has been overlaid. Nothing has been displaced. Nothing requires reconstruction. At this point, multiple

We thought we were building a 3D model of an aircraft. We were wrong. What we were actually building was a way to see change. The original idea seemed simple enough. Capture an aircraft with a level of detail that would allow us to create a highly accurate digital representation of its exterior condition. Every panel, every rivet line, every antenna, every surface detail preserved in a way that could be viewed, measured, and revisited long after the aircraft had left the hang