A disturbed combustion process in an aircraft engine has an impact on the internal flow and leads to specific irregularities in the species distribution in the exhaust jet. Measuring this distribution provides information about the combustion state and offers the possibility to reduce the engine down-time during inspection. The approach has the potential to improve the resource management as well as the availability and safety of the system. Aim of the research project is to evaluate the state of an aircraft engine by analyzing the emission field in the exhaust jet and using a support vector machine (SVM) algorithm for automatic defect detection and allocation.