(Z Corp.: Burlington, MA) -- When a 30-year-old aircraft arrives in the hangar for retrofitting or repair, the more information engineers have the better.

That's why Texas-based aviation services company, M7 Aerospace, is now offering a new service to create precise, 3-D portraits of entire planes down to one-thousandth of an inch. To execute the job, M7 purchased a Z Corp. ZScanner 700 PX, a precision handheld laser scanner that can scan large objects such as aircraft and automobiles—items that previously have been too big to capture with handheld scanners.

M7 recently used the ZScanner to precisely capture the entire surface of a Fairchild Metroliner at a resolution of 0.1 mm, in just three days. The Fairchild Metroliner is a 19-seat commuter class, turboprop aircraft with a 57-foot wingspan. The same job would have taken weeks or months, if attempted at all, with other scanning technology.

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