Systems and methods for automatically identifying and classifying distress of an aircraft component are provided. In one embodiment, a method includes accessing one or more digital images captured of the aircraft component and providing the one or more digital images as an input to a multi-layer network image classification model. The method further includes generating a classification output for the one or more images from the multi-layer network image classification model and automatically classifying the distress of the aircraft component based at least in part on the classification output.