MetroStar, IRIS, and What Defense Maintainers Taught Commercial MRO

A maintainer works through the access opening of a KC-135 fuel tank. The respirator is sealed, the space is tight, and the only light is the light they brought in. Outside the aircraft, a teammate is watching the same view the maintainer sees, on a screen at a workstation, and talking them toward the next fastener line. Nobody else has to climb in.

That is the working picture behind IRIS, the Integrated Respirator Information System. It started with Air Force maintainers, it reached the field with MetroStar, and the habits it built in one of the hardest environments in defense are habits commercial MRO is still trying to form.

Where IRIS Came From

According to the US Air Force, the idea came from a team of Airmen with the 100th Maintenance Squadron at RAF Mildenhall, who first developed it in 2018 and later took it to the Air Force's 2019 Spark Tank innovation competition. It did not place first, but it earned enough support to be funded and developed.

The problem they were solving was specific. Fuel tank work is confined, dark, and full of vapor. The person inside has limited visibility and limited communication, and the people outside have even less. The Air Force describes IRIS as providing point-of-view video, two-way audio, and a headlamp so maintainers outside the confined space can monitor the work in real time.

MetroStar, a firm that builds software and AI-enabled solutions for federal agencies, has been the partner guiding IRIS toward wider Air Force and Department of Defense use. MetroStar announced in December 2025 that IRIS had received intrinsically safe certification from UL and was being rolled out to fuel tank maintenance teams working on KC-135 and C-130 aircraft. In July 2026, Travis Air Force Base purchased IRIS directly.

Lesson One: The People Doing the Work Define the Requirement

The most useful thing about IRIS's history is who wrote the requirement. Maintainers who had been inside those tanks knew what was missing. They asked to be seen and heard while their hands were busy and their face was behind a respirator.

Commercial MRO programs often start from the other end. A tool gets selected at the enterprise level, pushed to the hangar floor, and quietly abandoned when it asks for a free hand. The defense lesson is to start at the access panel. Ask the technician what the remote expert needs to see, and build backward from that.

Lesson Two: Certification Is Part of the Product, Not a Hurdle After It

The Air Force notes that IRIS went through years of testing to meet official safety standards so it could be used in fuel tanks and other areas with explosive vapors. That timeline is not a delay to apologize for. It is the reason the system is allowed in the space at all.

Commercial operators face the same physics. Fuel tank entry on a commercial airframe carries the same vapor hazard, and a camera that is not rated for the atmosphere does not belong in it. Any wearable program that touches confined or hazardous spaces should treat intrinsic safety as a first-order requirement, not a feature to add in a later phase.

Lesson Three: Fewer People in the Hazard, Fewer Trips Back In

One of the outcomes the Air Force highlights is simple. IRIS can reduce the number of times maintainers must re-enter fuel tanks. Every re-entry is another round of preparation, another exposure, and more downtime.

The USAF projects that IRIS could save more than 35,000 work hours annually on KC-135 maintenance and return about 7,000 days of aircraft availability each year. Those are Air Force figures for one fleet, but the mechanism transfers directly. When the supervisor, inspector, or engineer can see inside without going inside, findings get confirmed on the first entry instead of a later one.

On the commercial side, Boeing has put AOG costs at 10,000 to 150,000 dollars per hour, and confined-space findings are exactly the kind of work that can stretch a ground time.

Lesson Four: The Record Is a Byproduct of the Work

When a session is streamed, it can also be captured. The Travis AFB announcement describes IRIS organizing each maintenance session into a searchable digital log book and pairing it with an AI assistant grounded in the unit's technical knowledge base. That turns the inspection itself into documentation, instead of asking the maintainer to reconstruct it on paper afterward.

Commercial MRO already lives on records. Task cards and sign-offs carry the regulatory weight, but they rarely carry the observation itself. First-person footage tied to the task fills that gap without adding steps for the technician.

Lesson Five: The Integration Path Matters as Much as the Hardware

IRIS reached Air Force units through a partner who understood how federal programs buy and support technology, and it is available through the Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace, which the DoD uses to acquire commercial technology. Commercial MRO has its own version of that path: quality systems, IT security review, existing MRO software, and labor agreements. Programs that plan for those early move faster than programs that discover them after a pilot.

What This Means for Commercial MRO

The defense maintainers behind IRIS proved a few things commercial hangars can take as given. Start with the technician's view. Treat hazardous-area safety as part of the design. Use live video to keep extra people out of the hazard. And let the session become the record.

IRIS is built on ActionStreamer's intrinsically safe wearables and ActionSync, our live-video software that streams from wearables and field devices to remote experts, command centers, recording, and AI, and it is brought to the Department of Defense in partnership with MetroStar. You can read more on the IRIS product page or in IRIS for Aircraft Maintainers.

If your MRO operation is weighing what defense programs have already learned about confined-space and remote inspection work, request a workflow assessment. We will map where first-person video would remove a re-entry or a trip on your next heavy check.