Donecle announced that Regional Jet Center, the Embraer-specialized MRO, has selected their automated drone solution for performing aircraft visual inspections. The multi-year agreement covers the deployment and support of an automated drone solution and sets the baseline for a strong technical partnership between both companies.
Regional Jet Center is based at Schiphol Airport and performs extended line maintenance operations for all KLM Cityhopper aircraft as well as several other Embraer operators. The growing MRO has an ambitious roadmap to further digitalize and automate their operations, to which the Donecle solution will contribute.
“We have been looking into drone inspections for the past couple of years as we believe they have the potential to accelerate inspections and improve overall traceability,” said Michiel van der Eijk, managing director of Regional Jet Center, on the choice of Donecle’s solution. “We recently trialed Donecle’s drone system and were impressed by its capabilities. We are looking forwards to this partnership.”
The deployed system features fully automatic flight on all Embraer aircraft, with advanced image analysis and reporting software to accelerate all visual inspections, such as general visual inspections, lightning strike inspections, paint and placards inspections. The drone solution comes with a secured cloud platform for tracking data over time and providing digital twin models of the aircraft surface. This will allow for seamless integration with MRO software solutions such as AMOS from Swiss AviationSoftware Ltd as being used by the Regional Jet Center.
“We are extremely happy with our partnership with Regional Jet Center. Deploying our technology at Schiphol Airport is one thing, but starting the qualification of our tool on Embraer aircraft is clearly another. As RJC services over 55 Embraer aircrafts per year in brand new facilities with state-of-the-art tools and innovative teams, we have found the perfect partner for our first deployment on Embraer,” said Matthieu Claybrough, CEO of Donecle on the partnership.