Aircraft Depainting Robot: Strippers to ABB Lasers

An aircraft depainting robot strips old paint and primer off a fuselage so the airframe can be inspected and repainted. It is slow, dirty work that every airliner and military jet goes through several times in its life, because paint adds weight and hides corrosion. This post looks at how crews did it by hand with chemicals and sanders, how blasting with plastic beads took over, and how laser robots now burn coatings away at bases like Hill Air Force Base. It also covers where ABB's paint, grinding and large handling robots fit, and what still makes the job hard to automate.

An Austrian Airlines Boeing 777-200ER stripped of its old paint in a hangar after leaving the Vietnam Airlines fleet, 2014. Photo: Austrian Airlines / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How crews stripped aircraft with chemicals and sanders

For most of the jet age, depainting meant chemistry. Workers in protective suits brushed or sprayed a thick chemical stripper onto the skin, waited for the paint to wrinkle and lift, then scraped and washed it off. Before they could start, every seam, composite panel and antenna had to be masked, because the strippers could attack those materials. The waste was a toxic mix of solvent, water and paint, and military primers added hexavalent chromium and cadmium, both carcinogens. Stripping a large aircraft could keep it out of service for days.

A corrosion control airman applies paint remover to a B-52G wing tip before grinding and repainting, 1990s. Photo: U.S. Department of Defense via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Where chemicals could not be used, people sanded. Mechanics with orbital sanders worked panel by panel, wearing respirators against the dust, around rivets and fasteners that a careless pass could damage. This is still common for touch ups and smaller jobs, from a fighter on a carrier hangar deck to an airliner door. It is tiring, inconsistent work, and the quality depends on the person holding the tool. Sanding also takes off a little metal or composite each time, which adds up over the long life of an airframe.

A C-5 Galaxy in a depaint hangar at Warner Robins, with seams, composite areas and antennas masked before stripper is sprayed on, 2008. Photo: Sue Sapp / U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The US Air Force moved much of its fighter stripping to plastic media blasting, which works like sandblasting with plastic beads. It cut the solvent waste but brought its own problems. According to engineers at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, blasting one F-16 produces about 2,000 pounds of hazardous dust, and each jet is limited to three blasts because the beads fatigue the metal. Researchers began to look at lasers instead, and around 2012 groups including Carnegie Mellon's robotics center were building autonomous laser stripping robots for military aircraft.

A sailor sands old paint off an F/A-18 Hornet in the hangar bay of USS Harry S. Truman, 2004. Photo: Jay C. Pugh / U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Laser robots and the hunt for hidden defects

Late in September 2026 Airbus confirmed a quality problem on the A321neo: the anti corrosion protection on stringers in the forward fuselage was not applied properly at a coatings supplier. Reports put the number of affected jets at about 500, half of them already flying, and the flaw came to light when a technician scraped paint from a part and found gaps in the primer. Airlines have two years to repair it, with the main repair taking two to three days. The flaw showed up only once paint came off, a reminder of why clean, controlled stripping matters to airlines.

A painter at Robins Air Force Base sprays a C-130 and C-17 aileron inside an enclosed paint booth, 2017. Photo: Tommie Horton / U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Hill Air Force Base has used laser robots on production F-16s since 2017. Two robots, one on each side of the jet, scan it with lidar, move between five or six stations, and fire 6 kilowatt continuous wave lasers that burn the coating off while a vacuum pulls away the smoke. The waste drops from about a ton of dust to 10 to 12 pounds of ash, and the laser can stop at the primer. The system struggles with glossy white paint, though. In the civil market, XYREC in the Netherlands builds laser coating removal robots that it says can cover aircraft up to the size of an A380.

A wing commander tries a laser paint removal system in the metals technology shop at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, 2022. Photo: Emmeline James / U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

ABB has no announced aircraft depainting project, but several of its products already do neighbouring jobs. The IRB 5500 paint robot is built to work in the explosive air of a paint booth, and ABB paint robots apply coatings to car bodies every day. The IRB 6700 handles heavy grinding and finishing, as in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Mounting a laser head or a sanding tool on an arm like this, on a long track, is one way an ABB robot could work along a fuselage. Our post on ABB paint robots shows how they handle large surfaces.

An ABB IRB 5500 paint robot, a design built to work in explosive paint booth air. Photo: ABB

What comes next for robotic aircraft depainting

The trend is toward robots that strip and repaint in the same hangar. Large aircraft need reach of many metres, so systems combine a strong arm with a gantry, a mobile base or a long rail. ABB robots can be mounted on tracks and coordinated as external axes, and several arms can share one controller with MultiMove. For an airliner that would mean planning paths for thousands of square metres of skin, a job that is normally simulated offline in RobotStudio before any laser fires.

An ABB IRB 6700 on a track picking crates of fresh food at Heemskerk's facility in the Netherlands. Photo: ABB

Factories building new aircraft need the same skills in a different form. Parts arrive in primer and are painted before assembly, and the Airbus case shows how much depends on coatings being right the first time. Robots that inspect surfaces, sand them evenly and spray primer in sealed booths could catch or prevent such defects earlier. ABB's paint and grinding robots, with Foundry protection against dust and liquids, could suit that kind of work. No ABB aerospace contract of this kind has been announced.

An ABB IRB 6700 grinding a steel part in Teqram's EasyGrinder cell at Ancofer. Photo: ABB

The open problems are cost and certification. A laser robot cell for a fighter costs far more than a blast booth, and an airliner hangar system costs more again. Every new process has to be approved by the aircraft maker and the authorities, and lasers bring their own safety rules, since no one may walk in while they run. Skilled painters and corrosion technicians are still needed to program, supervise and finish the job. For small operators, hand sanding and chemicals will stay in use for years, while the big military depots move to lasers.

A T-38 Talon in the paint barn after it has been stripped, waiting for a new paint scheme, 2019. Photo: Dwight Harp / U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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