Case Study: Aviation Museum Dübendorf digitizes historic P-16 jet with Hexagon Leica T-Scan

History making Cold War era Swiss jet fully digitized with Leica T-Scan

The Aviation Museum Dübendorf, home to the historic Swiss P-16 fighter bomber, faced the challenge of digitally preserving the aircraft. With no surviving design drawings, a mechanical engineering student sought to digitize the large jet for aerodynamic analysis, a task requiring extreme accuracy over a vast surface area that other scanning solutions could not provide. Hexagon provided its Leica T-Scan system coupled with a Leica Absolute Tracker to perform the pro bono work.

Hexagon's solution used a laser tracker and handheld scanner to capture 40 million data points over two days. This data was processed using the PolyWorks software suite to create an accurate, usable 3D model consisting of over 7 million triangles. This digital representation enabled the recalculation of the aircraft's performance data, providing never-before-existing information on its flight characteristics and preserving a significant piece of aviation history.