NASA Selects Finalists in Student Aircraft Maintenance Competition – NASA

NASA has selected eight student teams as finalists for the 2026 Gateways to Blue Skies competition, giving them the resources to help address a critical challenge for U.S. aviation: maintenance.

Challenges facing the commercial aviation industry include a shortage of qualified maintenance personnel and a growing demand to keep complex aircraft in service for longer. With Gateways to Blue Skies, NASA is harnessing student innovation to tackle some of aviation’s most important topics, and the current competition, RepAir: Advancing Aircraft Maintenance, seeks solutions that can make an immediate impact.

“Through this competition, students will learn about aviation maintenance and have the means to change its future,” said Steven Holz, associate project manager for the NASA University Innovation Project and jury co-chair for Gateways to Blue Skies. “By basing innovative ideas on real operational needs and presenting them to NASA and industry experts, these teams demonstrate the type of critical thinking, collaboration and forward-looking problem-solving that will shape a safer, more efficient aviation industry in the near future.”

This competition challenged teams of post-secondary students to conceptualize innovative systems and practices that could advance today’s commercial aircraft maintenance and repair operations. It serves a dual purpose for NASA: supporting innovative research and stimulating the potential aviation workforce of tomorrow.

The goal of RepAir: Advancing Aircraft Maintenance is to generate concepts to improve the efficiency, safety, and costs of the aviation maintenance industry by 2035. This timeline differs from many NASA research competitions focused on long-term future technologies; RepAir seeks to solve today’s maintenance problems.

NASA made its selections based on a review of participant proposals and accompanying videos summarizing the RepAir concepts. The eight finalist teams will receive a $9,000 prize and will advance to Phase 2 of the competition.

Phase 2 includes a review of the final document, infographic, and each team’s presentation at the Gateways to Blue Skies 2026 forum, held May 18 at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, in May and broadcast live around the world. Following the forum, members of the winning team who meet the eligibility criteria will be offered the opportunity to intern with NASA Aeronautics.

Finalist projects in the 2026 Gateways to Blue Skies competition represent a range of capabilities, including robotic inspections, augmented reality smart glasses, and sensor and machine learning architectures:

• Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University of Daytona Beach with Cecil College Maryland
  Advancing aircraft maintenance, smart mechanic glasses
• Manhattan University
  Enhanced Aircraft Resilience and Intelligence Systems (AERIS)
• Michigan State University
  Surface Assessment Network for Captive Inspection and Non-Destructive Evaluation (SENTINEL)
• South Dakota State University
  Surveying Platform and Inspection Device for Closed Regions (SPIDER)
• South Dakota State University
  WINGMAN, augmented reality data logging and information display system for improved efficiency in online inspections and maintenance reporting

• South Dakota State University
  Surface preservation and anti-rust (SPARK) Caterpillar

• University of California, Irvine
  Aircraft Health Structural Intelligence for Life Cycle Assessment and Detection (Air SHIELD)
• University of Maryland East Coast
  A self-supervised learning framework for health management of auxiliary power unit (APU) fuel control units in aircraft known as Sentinel APU

The Gateways to Blue Skies Challenge is being conducted through the Transformative Aeronautics Concepts program of NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. The NASA Tournament Lab, part of the Space Technology Mission Directorate’s Prizes, Challenges and Crowdsourcing program, is managing the challenge through the National Aerospace Institute on behalf of NASA.

Learn more about the Gateways to Blues Skies competition: The RepAir: Advancing Aircraft Maintenance competition is available on the competition website.