An aviation industry startup accelerator program has selected an artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP)-based platform called Whispr to help improve the speed, accuracy and safety of aircraft inspections and turnarounds. As part of International Airline Group's (IAG) Hangar 51 accelerator program, Whispr is partnering with Spanish carrier Iberia to implement its hands-free voice guidance platform on two projects. The first project is being conducted with Iberia Maintenance at Madrid-Barajas Airport (MAD) to digitize the aircraft inspection documentation process on the airline's new fleet of Airbus A350s, which up until now has been entirely paper-based. According to Hugh O'Flanagan, Whispr's co-founder and CEO, the existing inspection process entails engineers walking around the aircraft and checking tens of items in each different section as they manually complete a paper-based report, which then has to be manually input into a system.