In many lines of work related to manufacturing, one of the most important tools of the trade is a borescope. Whether workers are trying to inspect the inside of a turbine, a specific area of an aircraft or for use in non-destructive testing (NDT), a borescope is an important tool to have.

When it comes to gas turbine inspections, they are a bit more difficult than some other industrial procedures. A gas turbine usually operates at a high temperature (about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and because of that, a borescope plays an important role.

In fact, without the use of a borescope it is hard to do a gas turbine inspection to try and identify if there are any issues with it. If there are any issues and a turbine inspection isn’t done, people in the immediate area of the turbine could be a risk due to the high temperature.

Using a borescope for a turbine inspection allows turbine workers to view the innermost workers of the machine that can’t be seen otherwise. Another benefit of a borescope is that it can be used without fear of harming the turbine.


A typical borescope has several length options, both flexible and rigid. It also has a lighting system and an optical system, which is made up of a CMOS camera, a relay lens, rod lens and an eyepiece so workers can see exactly what they’re looking at.


Using a borescope isn’t the only way to do a gas turbine inspection, but it offers several advantages that other tools don’t:

• High quality images: A rigid borescope can produce high quality imagines of whatever parts of a turbine are being looked at and flexible borescope cameras can offer quality pictures as well. Depending on what kind of borescope is being used, it can detect imperfections in a turbine’s machinery as tiny as .01%.
• Easy to use: Borescopes are designed to be straightforward and easy to manipulate, whether an inspector is using a rigid option or a flexible. For such an important job, having a versatile tool comes in handy when compared to some other devices used for inspection.
• Coverage: With a turbine and many other pieces of machinery, it’s impossible to see the inner workings with the naked eye. A borescope, especially a flexible borescope, reaches greater depths and covers more area on the inside of a turbine with better accuracy and detail than other devices can.

If a gas company is in need of a turbine inspection, getting a boresope inspection and borescope inspection report can help the company identify problems and imperfections in the machinery and give them a plan to go about fixing the issues at hand.