Austrian Airlines Using Donecle’s Automated Inspection Drone

Sept. 20, 2019
Donecle is excited to partner with Austrian Airlines to help the airline optimize their maintenance process by reducing time of aircraft inspection while increasing reliability, safety and traceability of airframe checks.

Donecle announced it has signed on Austrian Airlines, member of the Lufthansa Group, for its automated drone inspection solution. Donecle is excited to partner with Austrian Airlines to help the airline optimize their maintenance process by reducing time of aircraft inspection while increasing reliability, safety and traceability of airframe checks.

Donecle delivered its solution to Austrian which has been using it since the middle of the year for aircraft visual inspections during line maintenance as well as for unscheduled events.

Donecle not only provides an automated drone which scans the complete external surface of the aircraft, but also delivers analysis software which assists the inspector to visualize and detect defects on the images, evaluate paint quality or check regulatory markings. All images are stored on a secure cloud platform to build a digital history of the aircraft and improve traceability over time, contributing to a paperless process.

Josselin Bequet, CEO and co-founder of Donecle says, “We are very happy to provide our solution to Austrian and to collaborate on extended features and capabilities. This validates the relevance of our solution and the need from the market to integrate new innovative solutions in their maintenance process to optimize their daily activities.”

A technical partnership was also agreed to work on the lightning strike use case. With the current traditional manual process, inspecting an aircraft after a lightning takes several hours to check for potential damage. With Donecle’s solution, Austrian expects to considerably reduce this long inspection time down to 2 hours, having a significant impact on AOG costs and aircraft availability to better serve its passengers.

The solution will be used to inspect Austrian Airlines’ Airbus narrowbody fleet and both companies are also working to extend capabilities to Embraer E-Jet inspections as part of this technical collaboration.

Michael Kaye, vice president Austrian Airlines technical operations, on the advantages of the new drone technology, "Our aspiration at Austrian Technik is to stay up-to-date when it comes to new developments. Innovative systems such as these drones perfectly support us to further enhance our stability in flight operations and avoid flight cancellations".