Drone technology to advance aircraft inspections

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Drone accelerate checks

The fully autonomous drone will be tested until the end of the year. Under the supervision of an aircraft technician, the drone implements inspections on the exterior of the aircraft in the Austrian Airlines hangar by means of state-of-the-art, patented laser technology.

The system flies autonomously, from takeoff to landing to inspect all areas of the aircraft. The drone takes a high-resolution image every second. On the basis of these images, the accompanying software automatically identifies damage to the structure and paintwork of the aircraft, for example missing aircraft labels. The aircraft technician has the possibility to examine the damage in detail on his tablet and generate a report for the Austrian Airlines maintenance team. The drone does the preparatory work and accelerates the inspection.

However, the final decision is made by the certified aircraft technician, who is also given extensive theoretical and practical training in operating the drone.

Drone inspections of the Airbus and soon the Embraer fleet

At present, the drone inspections are being carried out on the Airbus fleet of Austrian Airlines, which will grow from 36 to 46 aircraft in the coming years. Austria’s red-white-red flag carrier plans to expand autonomous aircraft inspections to other aircraft models in the future. Starting in September, the 17 Embraer planes deployed by Austrian Airlines will also be checked by the new technology.

"Another option would be to deploy the drones worldwide in our technical partner companies. In this way we could obtain an accurate picture here in Vienna of paintwork carried out at another location for example," adds Kaye in describing the future potential of the technology.

Idea competition at Lufthansa Systems

The starting point for the use of the new technology at Austrian Airlines was an idea competition held at the Group sister company Lufthansa Systems. The drone provider, Donecle presented its innovation at a start-up challenge, and subsequently developed potential applications for the autonomous drone in inspecting aircraft in cooperation with Lufthansa Technik.

Austrian Airlines serves as a test case within the Lufthansa Group and is further developing the technology together with “Donecle” based on the experience gained from its line operations.