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Fatigue cracks and corrosion damages are beside human errors the main causes for structural failures of all surface transport products like ships, road tankers and railway tank cars. In order to prevent those structural failures, maintenance and inspection has to be carried out. These activities require high efforts and are usually performed while the transport product is out of service. The paper shall point out the today's problems with the time driven maintenance and inspection of all ground transportation products. It shows that the conventional methodology is time-consuming, expensive and sometimes improper. By the application of a monitoring technique, which can detect the different damage mechanism during their origin, we would be able to replace the maintenance intervals by information, which is coming in-service and on-line from the monitoring technique. Acoustic Emission provides an integral statement about the structure and is therefore the only possible solutions for a complete monitoring. During the pre-tests the application of AE was proven even the support of other techniques (e.g. preceding calculations and definition of hotspots, further in-service measurements) become necessary for a complete health monitoring of the transport products.