Japan Airlines has begun a verification project with French maintenance-drone specialist Donecle to use fully autonomous drones for exterior aircraft inspections at its hangars in Japan. The programme centres on Donecle’s Iris GVI system and is designed to cut the time needed for manual checks at height while improving safety and inspection efficiency across JAL’s maintenance operations.
The drones fly without touching the aircraft and use obstacle-detection and image-analysis tools to map and identify defects on the fuselage and other external surfaces. JAL has been comparing conventional visual inspections with drone-captured images since the end of June, testing the system in real maintenance work rather than in a laboratory environment. The project is described as the first in Japan to use autonomous drones approved in aircraft manufacturers’ maintenance manuals for this purpose.
JAL intends to use any time saved from exterior inspections to support predictive maintenance and broader aircraft quality work. The initiative remains a verification project, with no fleetwide rollout or commercial deployment timetable disclosed.