Delair

Delair builds long-range fixed-wing drones in Toulouse and sells them to armies, police forces, utilities and surveyors. The company was founded in 2011 and made its name early by flying the first commercially certified beyond visual line of sight mission in Europe, inspecting power lines for the French grid operator. Its aircraft are certified Origine France Garantie, and the firm keeps the whole production chain in house rather than assembling imported airframes. That sovereignty argument has become the commercial argument, and it is why the Occitanie region and the Banque des Territoires have publicly reaffirmed their backing.

The range is organised by endurance and size. The UX11 is a 1.5 kilogram mapping aircraft with an in-house industrial camera in visible or infrared configurations. The DT26 line, with a 3.3 metre span and around 16 kilograms of mass, comes in surveillance, tactical and open payload versions for units that want to fit their own sensors. The DT46 is the volume product, a quiet electrically powered mini drone that converts between fixed-wing and vertical take-off in about fifteen minutes in the field without tools, designed against beyond visual line of sight rules. At the 2025 Paris Air Show Delair added the DT61, a much longer-ranged multi-mission aircraft with vertical take-off, a heavier payload and a two-person set-up time under thirty minutes, aimed at watching large land and sea areas.

Four application areas carry the business. Security and defence covers day and night monitoring of infrastructure and sensitive zones, reconnaissance and special operations work. Linear and infrastructures covers power line, pipeline and rail corridor inspection, the market Delair started in. Geospatial covers survey-grade mapping and digital twin data capture. Manufacturing and support is sold in its own right, with engineering studies, subsystem development and drone system design work for third parties alongside worldwide support centres and pilot services. Defence orders have grown quickly. France funded 100 loitering munitions for Ukraine for delivery in summer 2024 inside a wider order of about 2,000 for French and Ukrainian forces, followed by a contract for 400 more DT26 and UX11 aircraft. The Gendarmerie Nationale adopted the DT46 from summer 2025 after trials, the French Navy and Army flew Delair systems during the Dragoon Fury 2025 maritime experimentation, and the company is working with Ascendance on a hybrid-electric observation demonstrator for DGA missile testing. Delair also bought the Grenoble swarm specialist Squadrone System in October 2024. Recognition has followed the growth, with the company named Occitanie scale-up of the year in the 2025 EY awards, eleven years after an earlier prize for growth potential. Manufacturing stays in Toulouse. Keeping airframe, autopilot, payload and ground segment under one roof is what lets Delair turn a surveillance aircraft into a one-way attack munition without waiting on a foreign supplier, and that flexibility is the reason French procurement has leaned on the firm during the Ukraine surge.