Delair Brand Guidelines: The Toulouse Fixed-Wing Drone Maker Founded in 2011

Four engineers and a fixed-wing drone in Toulouse.

Delair began in Toulouse in 2011 as Delair-Tech. When the start-up bought an embedded-systems firm in 2016, the French business site Maddyness described it as created by four French engineers and presenting itself as a drone specialist that supplied professionals with data collected and analysed by drones certified for flights beyond the pilot’s line of sight. Two of the founders are named in that report: Michaël de Lagarde, quoted as co-founder, and Bastien Mancini, then head of research and development.

The company’s early market was inspection and mapping of long networks. Delair says that in 2012 it unveiled an early drone certified for beyond-visual-line-of-sight flight in civilian airspace, to inspect power lines; we give that as the company’s claim. Its website quotes a technical manager in the drone division of the French railway operator SNCF, who says the two had worked together since late 2012, starting with the DT26 for mapping the rail network and later for surveillance.

Growth came partly through acquisitions. In September 2016 Maddyness reported that Delair-Tech had bought Eukréa Electromatique, a Bordeaux embedded-systems engineering firm founded in 2014 that had been its technical partner since 2013; with the merger its research team reached 70 people, and the company was active in about thirty countries, in agriculture, linear infrastructure, energy, mining and construction. A month later, on 10 October 2016, the American positioning group Trimble announced that Delair-Tech had acquired its Belgium-based Gatewing unmanned-aircraft engineering and manufacturing business, and that Delair-Tech would become one of its preferred suppliers of fixed-wing drones. Financial terms were not disclosed. Trimble said the sale was part of a continuing programme to tighten its corporate focus, and that it would stay in the market through software that works with drones of different makes.

From survey wings to observation drones.

Today the company trades as Delair, from the domain delair.aero, and describes itself as a maker of long-range fixed-wing drones and sensors for industry and defence. Its range, as listed on its website, runs from the small UX11 mapping drone, offered with an in-house industrial camera and in an infrared version, to the DT26 line for surveillance and open payloads, the DT46, which the company says converts from fixed-wing to vertical take-off in the field without tools, and the DT61, a long-distance observation drone with vertical take-off that it unveiled at the Paris Air Show in June 2025. It also lists the Hydrone, an underwater drone called SEASAM and a ground-control station called DRAKO.

Defence work features prominently on the company’s website and in the press. In March 2024 the Ukrainian defence site Militarnyi, citing L’Usine Nouvelle, reported that Delair would supply 400 reconnaissance drones to Ukraine, of the DT26 and UX11 types, and quoted its chief executive as saying that DT26 production had tripled in a year. The same report recalled that at the end of February 2024 the French government had been reported to order 100 of Delair’s loitering munitions for Ukraine, within a programme of 2,000 for the French army and Ukraine’s forces.

Delair’s own press releases add more recent steps: the purchase of Squadrone System, a Grenoble maker of drone swarms and inspection drones, in October 2024; a collaboration with Ascendance on a hybrid-electric observation demonstrator in February 2025; and the French Gendarmerie nationale taking the DT46 into its units from summer 2025. In October 2025 the company said it had been named Occitanie Scale-Up of the Year in the EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards, eleven years after an EY award for growth potential in 2014.

Commercial drone makers.

Commercial drone makers sell instruments, not toys, and their pictures show it. The aircraft usually appear in the field rather than in a studio: a fixed-wing or vertical take-off airframe, often in white with a bright orange or another high-visibility colour, standing on gravel at a quarry edge, on a farm track or beside a pipeline before launch. The landscape matters as much as the machine, because the product being sold is the map, the model or the measurement that comes back.

Inspection and delivery makers have their own set pieces. Caged inspection drones are photographed inside boiler rooms, tanks, sewers and mines, lit only by their own lamps, with the protective frame as the defining shape. Delivery companies show a parcel being lowered on a line or dropped by a small parachute into a garden, a hospital yard or a field, so that the service, rather than the aircraft, carries the story.

People appear mainly as operators. A typical scene is a field crew in high-visibility clothing holding a tablet or a ground station, planning a flight or checking images on screen, with the drone small in the background. Brochures and websites follow the same order: the industry first, such as surveying, construction, mining, agriculture or public safety, then the workflow, then the hardware, with software screenshots and sample maps placed beside the aircraft.

Much of the industry still meets in person. Trade fairs such as Commercial UAV Expo and XPONENTIAL bring makers, software firms and operators to the same exhibition halls, where stands show airframes on plinths next to large screens of point clouds and orthophotos. In this guide we record what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Made in Toulouse, by its own account.

Where Delair’s drones are made is a point the company stresses. Its website says it has a production and warehousing site in Toulouse, where technicians work in composite lamination, industrial painting, electronics soldering and mechanical assembly, and that it keeps full control over the whole production chain; it also offers that manufacturing capacity to outside clients. Delair says its observation drones have carried the “Origine France Garantie” label since 23 March 2023, a certification that, the company says, is awarded by an independent body after an audit.

The company remains led by one of its founders. Introducing an interview published in the aerospace weekly Air & Cosmos on 19 February 2026, Delair described Bastien Mancini as its president and co-founder, said he created the company fifteen years earlier, and put its staff at about 250 people. In the same note it listed among its supporters the French armed forces ministry, the DGA procurement agency, the Occitanie region and Bpifrance. In December 2025 it said the president of the Occitanie region and the head of the Banque des Territoires had visited its premises.

For a design guide, Delair shows how a drone maker that began by selling inspection data can move into observation and defence while keeping one engineering identity, a Toulouse factory and a family of numbered airframes. Compare Parrot, another French drone maker, and Quantum Systems, which also builds fixed-wing drones with vertical take-off. For this guide we use a night navy, a sky blue and a sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Delair’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.