Detecting surface defects on aircraft is critical to safety in the aerospace field. The current detection methods suffer from low efficiency, high false positive rate and poor adaptability to complex environment. Although the existing target detection algorithms have achieved notable performance in this field, at present, many models in this field still face considerable challenges. For example, due to the constraints of hardware platforms, machines that can be deployed on edge devices such as UAVs and robots need lightweight and easy-to-deploy models, but lightweight designs often a certain degree of accuracy degradation. At the same time, most of the surface defects of the aircraft are small targets, which impose higher demands on the model. In order to solve these limitations, this paper proposes an improved YOLO model ME-YOLO (multi directional edge fusion YOLO) based on edge enhancement and multi-scale fusion. Firstly, the EdgePyramid module is designed, which uses the rich edge responses extracted by the Multi Orientation Attention Sobel (MOAS) module and through the three-layer cascade pool structure to construct the three-scale edge features aligned with the backbone network. Then, the EdgeEnhance module is introduced to adaptively fuse the conventional convolution features and edge features at the corresponding resolution, effectively enhancing the sensitivity of the model to the corrosion boundary. Experimental results show that, compared with the baseline YOLOv11, ME-YOLO improves mAP@0.5 by 2.7% and simultaneously increases Recall by 2.3%, which helps reduce missed detections of corrosion targets. Although the introduction of multi-directional edge priors brings a slight increase in parameters (+3.66M) and a minor decrease in inference speed (--8.6%), the model still maintains a real-time detection capability of 97.54 FPS, meeting the deployment requirements for edge devices such as UAVs. This strategy of trading a modest computational overhead for improved detection rates in safety-critical tasks offers a potentially practical and robust alternative for intelligent operation and maintenance of aviation equipment.