Austrian Airlines Is Flying Drones Around Planes for Maintenance

Granted, it doesn’t fly with the planes and doesn’t even see the outside: the Donecle-developed drone is used inside the hangar, to perform standard maintenance work and to document potential damage to the outside of the plane. It’s part of a year-long trial project from Austrian, who believes implementing it in the long-run would considerably cut down maintenance times and the workload of technicians.

You can see the drone in action in the video at the bottom of the page. Austrian says it takes it about one hour to perform a complete scan of an Airbus A320 aircraft and one more hour for a software program to analyze the images captured on the drone’s cameras. However, the final call belongs to an Austrian technician, who decides what steps should be taken next, taking into consideration the data gathered and analyzed.

“This innovation not only reduces the workload for technicians of Austria’s national carrier, but the shorter duration of the checks lasting less than two hours instead of the previous time required of four to ten hours enables quicker availability of the aircraft in daily flight operations,” Austrian says.

This also translates into more efficiency for the airline, as it’s able to get its planes back up in the skies quicker.

“At Austrian Airlines, we are constantly looking for solutions to optimize our processes,” Bernhard Schreckensperger, an avionics engineer at the airline, explains in the video. “We are currently testing various operational scenarios for an autonomous flying drone. These include lightning strike inspections, checks for the presence of [airline] stickers, checks of the aircraft’s paint finish, as well as the detection of structural damage.”

For the time being, the drone inspects all 36 Airbus A320 planes from Austrian, but there are plans to extend the program to include other aircraft models.