Donecle Iris
Donecle Iris pairs a fully autonomous, laser-guided inspection drone with image-analysis software that scans an entire aircraft in under an hour, flags damage, lightning strikes, paint wear and missing placards, then files the report automatically.
What is Donecle Iris?
Iris is the drone and software family built by Donecle, a French company founded in Toulouse in 2015 by aviation professionals who had grown tired of a job that had not changed in forty years. General visual inspection still meant scaffolding, cherry pickers and technicians working at height, with results that depended on who was looking. Iris replaces the access equipment with an aircraft that inspects itself, more or less: a fully automated drone that needs neither a pilot nor a GPS signal, positioning itself to the centimetre with patented laser technology and flying a mission loaded on board before takeoff. The workflow runs in three stages. The drone scans the whole external surface — fuselage, wings, nacelles, tailplane, upper areas and lower surfaces — and a narrowbody is covered in under an hour. Images then flow into Donecle's analysis software, where machine-learning algorithms propose defects, read regulatory markings against the customer's own database, map rivet rash and peeling to grade paint wear, and pick out lightning strike impacts. Every finding is placed against frames and stringers, and the inspector validates a pre-filled report rather than writing one. A single flight can close several job cards at once. Finally, reports and imagery are archived on a secure cloud platform, giving each airframe a digital history that can be compared inspection by inspection or benchmarked across a fleet. Three variants exist. Iris GVI carries a 24 MP camera at 16 px/mm² and is, per Donecle, the only drone accepted by both EASA and the FAA and listed in the Boeing and Airbus maintenance manuals. Iris dentCHECK, developed with 8tree, measures dents to 0.1 mm depth. Iris CMX, co-developed with AkzoNobel Aerospace Coatings, reads dry film thickness, gloss and colour to plan repaints. Beyond airframes, the same drone inspects removed engines, nacelles and landing gear in five to ten minutes. Donecle sells the whole package — hardware, software, hosting, training and maintenance — to airlines, MROs, manufacturers, business jet operators and military fleets.
What it does
- Scan an aircraft's entire external surface automatically, with no pilot and no GPS
- Detect defects and position them precisely against frames and stringers
- Locate lightning strike entry and exit points and report them
- Check 150 to 300 placards and markings, flagging what is missing or due for replacement
- Map paint wear across the livery and grade overall coating condition
- Measure dents down to 0.1 mm, plus coating thickness, gloss and colour
- Build a searchable digital history of every inspection on a secure cloud platform
When to use Donecle Iris / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Donecle Iris is the right fit.
When to use Donecle Iris
- Airlines and third-party MROs running line and base maintenance on narrowbody fleets
- Military aircraft operators maintaining combat, transport and surveillance fleets
- Business jet operators and the maintenance providers who serve them
- Aircraft manufacturers running final-assembly quality checks before delivery
- Engine, nacelle and landing gear shops inspecting removed components
When not to use Donecle Iris
- Teams wanting a self-service tool they can sign up for and try the same afternoon
- Anyone inspecting assets outside aviation — Iris covers aircraft and their components only
- Operators needing non-destructive testing: Iris reads surfaces, not what lies beneath them
- Buyers who need a published price before they will open a conversation with a salesperson
- Maintenance organisations with no hangar space or no appetite to train a crew on new hardware
How to use Donecle Iris
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Contact the Donecle team through the website form or download the brochure — there is no online sign-up
- Agree the scope with sales: aircraft types, use cases, and whether removed components are included
- Put the crew through the short training course; Donecle says a team is autonomous once it is done
- Bring the aircraft into the hangar and select the mission matching the job card
- Launch the flight from the tablet interface — no drone pilot, no GPS and no beacons to install
- Let Iris position itself by laser and scan the surface, upper areas and lower surfaces included
- Let the captured images transfer automatically into the analysis software
- Review the pre-filled report, where the algorithms propose defects, markings and paint condition
- Validate the findings as the qualified inspector and generate the final report
- Return to the cloud archive later to compare inspections over time or benchmark across the fleet
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Presented as the only inspection drone accepted by EASA and the FAA and listed in the Boeing and Airbus AMMs
- Time savings are published and specific: a GVI under an hour, a lightning strike check under two, a landing gear in six minutes
- Removes work at height and the access equipment that comes with it, a direct safety gain
- Results are objective and repeatable, so inspections can genuinely be compared over time and across a fleet
- One flight feeds several job cards and several use cases at once
- Sold as a complete package: drone, software, history hosting, training and maintenance
- Nine years of field use, named airline references and EN9100/ISO 9001:2018 certification at the vendor
Cons
- No published pricing of any kind — no rate card, no starting point, not even an order of magnitude
- No free plan and no trial; only a dentCHECK pilot programme is open, on unstated terms
- This is a hardware purchase as much as a software one, with the procurement cycle that implies
- No API and no public technical documentation; integration with MRO systems is announced as work in progress
- Coverage is not total: some lower areas are described as unflyable on certain aircraft types
- Thin legal documentation — one French-language terms page, no privacy policy, no DPA, no subprocessor list
- The hosting country for inspection data is never disclosed
Pricing & Plans
Donecle publishes no pricing for Iris. There is no rate card, no pricing page and no indicative figure anywhere on the site: the pricing URL returns a 404 and the sitemap lists no equivalent. Neither a permanent free plan nor a free trial is advertised. The commercial route is a quotation — every call to action leads to the contact form — and the offer is described as a complete package covering the drone, the image-analysis software, hosting of the inspection history, training and maintenance. A pilot programme for Iris dentCHECK is open to civil operators willing to test 3D dent measurement, though its commercial terms are not stated. Prospective buyers should expect a capital purchase negotiated case by case rather than a subscription.
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Donecle Iris handles your data.
GDPR overview
Donecle's terms cite the GDPR by name — Regulation (EU) 2016/679 of 27 April 2016 — and commit expressly to its Article 5 principles of lawfulness, transparency, integrity and confidentiality. Users are told they may access, update, correct or delete their data through the contact form or their Donecle contact, and may refer a refusal to the CNIL. Retention is capped at what is strictly necessary. Beyond that, implementation is thin for a company running a cloud platform: no dedicated privacy policy, no named data protection officer, no GDPR mailbox, no published data processing agreement and no subprocessor list. The clauses also address the website rather than the inspection service. No Article 27 representative is designated, which is expected of a company established in France.
Who owns the data?
Donecle publishes only website terms, written in French and governed by French law. No licence agreement or service contract covering inspection data is public, so ownership of that data is never stated in writing. What the site does commit to is narrower: it collects no personal data beyond what a visitor types into the contact form, and undertakes not to pass collected data to third parties without informing the user. On the product side, the FAQ says inspection data sits on Donecle's own cloud, that each airline's or MRO's data is segregated, and that no third party can reach it unless that customer explicitly asks. Ownership itself remains a matter for the commercial contract.
Reuse rights
Nothing published restricts what a customer may do with its own inspection reports — and nothing grants a right either, because the question is simply never addressed in writing. In practice the platform is built for reuse: reports can be reached remotely, shared securely with a team of experts, compared from one inspection to the next and benchmarked across a fleet, which is the stated purpose of the digital history. Donecle is equally silent, in both directions, on whether customer imagery feeds the training of its own detection models. Anyone who needs certainty on either point will have to obtain it from the commercial contract, which is not published.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Inspection data is stored on what Donecle calls its own secure cloud platform. The FAQ states that each airline's or MRO's data is segregated, that third parties cannot access it unless that customer explicitly requests it, and that data is stored redundantly with frequent backups. What the site never states is where: no country, no region and no cloud provider is named for the inspection service, which is why the hosting fields are left empty here. The one hosting fact published is about something else — the legal notice names Microsoft France SAS in Issy-les-Moulineaux as the host of the website itself, which says nothing about the inspection platform and should not be read as if it did. Independent DNS resolution of the site on 3 September 2026 in fact placed the web server on Microsoft infrastructure in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, rather than in France. Buyers with data residency requirements will need to raise them directly with Donecle.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Donecle Iris.
- The report arrives pre-filled: a qualified inspector must genuinely validate it, and rubber-stamping machine suggestions is the obvious failure mode
- Delegating routine visual inspection can erode the very expertise needed to judge when the software has got something wrong
- Coverage is not total — a few lower areas are unflyable on some types, and a partial scan should never be read as a complete check
- Inspection data describes fleet condition, military airframes included, and is held on the vendor's cloud in an undisclosed country
- Hardware, software and the entire inspection archive come from a single supplier, and no reversibility or data export path is documented
- With no DPA and no subprocessor list published, the processing chain cannot be verified from outside
- The EASA, FAA and AMM approvals belong to the drone; the airworthiness responsibilities of the operator using it remain entirely its own
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Moderate, and front-loaded. There is no self-service path: setup begins with a sales conversation, a quotation and delivery of physical hardware. Once that is done, Donecle describes the solution as off-the-shelf — a short training course leaves the customer's own team autonomous, flights are launched from a tablet interface, and no drone pilot is needed. Nothing has to be installed in the hangar because the drone positions itself by laser rather than GPS or beacons. Training and maintenance are included. The offsetting point is that with no API, results cannot be pushed automatically into an existing maintenance system.
Deployment
Behind Donecle Iris
Fundraising
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is Donecle Iris?
Does the drone need a pilot or a GPS signal?
Is Iris approved by the aviation authorities?
Which aircraft and which inspections does it cover?
How much faster is it than a manual inspection?
Where is the inspection data stored?
How much does it cost?
Is there an API to connect Iris to our MRO system?
Is the solution actually in service?
Does the drone cover the whole aircraft?
Should you pick Donecle Iris?
Donecle Iris is one of the rare industrial AI products that arrives with its homework done. The regulatory position is unusually strong — listed in the Boeing and Airbus maintenance manuals with EASA and FAA acceptance — and the field evidence is public rather than implied: named airline customers, more than forty drones flying in over fifteen countries, several thousand inspections. The engineering claim holds up too. Removing the GPS requirement with laser positioning is what makes hangar operation practical, and the time savings Donecle publishes are specific enough to be argued with rather than merely admired. The AI here assists rather than decides. Algorithms propose defects and read markings; a qualified inspector still validates a pre-filled report. That is the right division of labour for airworthiness work, and it is worth stating plainly, because the real risk is not that the software errs but that a busy team stops checking it. What a buyer will find frustrating is everything around the product. No price is published at any level, so the evaluation cannot begin without a sales conversation. There is no API and no developer documentation, which makes feeding results into an existing maintenance system a manual affair for now. And for a vendor holding fleet condition data — including military airframes — the published governance is remarkably light: a single terms page written in French on an otherwise English site, no privacy policy of its own, no processing agreement, no subprocessor list, and no disclosed hosting country. None of that suggests anything is wrong; it simply means the due diligence has to happen in the contract rather than on the website. For an airline, an MRO or a defence operator already convinced that visual inspection should be digitised, Iris is a serious and unusually well-credentialed candidate.
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