Out of sight, legally

Delair was founded in Toulouse in 2011 by four engineers, Michaël de Lagarde, Benjamin Benharrosh, Benjamin Michel and Bastien Mancini, to build fixed-wing drones for industry. Its first product, the DT18 of 2012, earned the company a distinction that mattered enormously to its customers: it became the first UAV certified in France to fly beyond visual line of sight. For a railway operator or a power company that wanted long linear assets surveyed from the air, a drone that could legally keep flying after the pilot lost sight of it was the whole point.

Buying up the competition

The company grew by acquisition as well as by design. In 2016 it bought Gatewing, the Belgian maker of mapping drones, from Trimble, and in 2018 it took over the assets of the American drone software firm Airware, which brought with it the French data-mining company Redbird. The same year Intel invested in Delair and built its technology into the Intel Insights drone platform, and the World Economic Forum named Delair a Technology Pioneer. Offices followed in Singapore, Beijing, Los Angeles, Paris and Ghent.

From survey work to the front line

Then the war in Ukraine gave a civil survey company a military future. In 2023 Delair supplied 150 drones to Kyiv, and in 2024 France announced an order for 2,000 UX11 drones in the Colibri configuration, a loitering-munition role, with 100 of them destined for the Ukrainian front. The UX11 itself is small: it can be ready to fly in about five minutes and carries a payload of up to 500 grams. With around 120 employees, Delair remains a modest firm, but one now caught up in Europe’s drone rearmament.

מפעלים

• Toulouse headquarters · Toulouse, Occitanie — Design and production base

שיאים וראשונות

• DT18 was the first UAV certified in France for beyond visual line of sight operation, 2012