15 July 2025
How do you strip paint, corrosion and years of accumulated grime from old aircraft – especially when it may contain hazardous chemicals?
It’s a problem the Royal Australian Air Force faced when its History and Heritage Restorations Support Section started restoring a 1951 Winjeel aircraft. The answer: laser cleaning.
Warrant Officer Paul Wendt said the process reduced months of labour-intensive sanding and grinding in full personal protective equipment to an environmentally friendly procedure that only took a few days.
“Because the laser removed only paint, grime and corrosion without scouring the underlying metal, the process revealed long-obscured original equipment manufacturer’s serial and part numbers and restored the bare metal to factory condition,” he said.
Australian Winjeel was a training aircraft. Photo: Michael Wignall
“It was amazing. We’d normally have 10 personnel working for a couple of months sanding around rivets to remove the paint.
“It’s difficult and repetitive work for volunteers in their 70s and 80s, and hazardous as well because the paint contains carcinogenic chemicals that make it difficult to work on, and time-consuming to clean up and safely dispose of.
“The laser did it in a few days and because it uses a HEPA filter that completely removes all the hazardous dust, clean-up time was reduced to zero.”
The laser cleaning system has also been used to clean the arresting hook system from modern RAAF aircraft.
“Using the laser resurfacer turned what would have been a week’s-plus work disrupting flying schedules into a two-hour job that reduced the safety hazard to zero,” said Babcock, the contractor.
