Very expensive task maintaining the transmissions of Marine Corps helicopters. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to dismantle the transmission, inspect it and reassemble it. On the other hand, a failure to identify faults in the system is very likely to be fatal.
Current solution is scheduled maintenance.
Marines were very interested in developing a system that could detect problems with the transmission before they became dangerous. The task also poses problems to the collection of data. Ideal data are collected from flying with a faulty transmission, but that is both expensive and dangerous. Standard neural networks need many examples of faulty transmissions. During testing the model on 9 examples of presumably operational helicopters, the network signalled that one was operating contrary to prediction.