Effective assurance of the integrity and performance of aging aircraft structures, particularly those that are made of composite materials, requires rapid inspection of large areas. Removal from the aircraft for NDE at an inspection facility is not economical and preferably the inspection should be performed at the field setting. Detection and characterization of defects are labor intensive, time consuming and when the process is manual the results are subjected to human error. These limitations of the standard NDE methods created a need for portable, user friendly inspection systems that can rapidly and automatically scan large areas of complex structures and locate all the detrimental material conditions. Addressing this need has been an evolutionary process that followed the technology trend, and unique devices were developed to perform field inspection. Such a development required integration of expertise in multidisciplinary areas that include NDE, telerobotics, neural networks, materials science, imbedded computing and automated control. Various portable inspection systems have emerged and the trend is toward fully automatic systems that autonomously inspect aircraft.