Drones are increasingly of interest for carrying out aircraft inspections. We found out more from Josselin Bequet, CEO & Co-Founder, Donecle.

Bequet said: “We’re using automated drones to conduct individual inspections of aircraft. The idea is to complement and replace inspections which are currently done manually with human inspectors climbing on top of the aircraft to access all the upper areas and check for potential damages or defects.

“The idea is to use these automated drones to fly around the aircraft much faster and automatically acquire a lot of images, which we’re then going to run through software to…automatically find damages on the aircraft structure.”

“20X faster”

Donecle claims its technology can enable aircraft inspections to be completed up to 20 times faster.

On how the automated process works, Bequet explained: “We’ve developed a laser positioning technology to enable the drones to position themselves relative to the aircraft. Any kind of aircraft they’re inspecting, they’re going to know what model it is – if it’s a 320, 737 Max, [etc.]. Based on that, they’re going to scan their environment, compare that to a model of the aircraft they have in their database and actually follow a mission, a trajectory, which they’re going to repeat for every inspection.”

Donecle claims its technology can enable aircraft inspections to be completed up to 20 times faster.

Air France -KLM was the first to acquire the system. Donecle is also working with airlines in Europe and the US, as well as OEMs.

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