Manufacturers experiment with the use of drones for various processes such as surveillance, inspection, cycle counting, and intralogistics, but implementation into routine operations remains rare. One reason for low adoption rates relates to the manual control requirements of most drone systems. This paper studies the use of automatic drones in manufacturing. A virtual simulation of drone flights in a manufacturing facility was developed to identify and evaluate the potential of automatic drones for thermal inspection of injection molding machines. This paper reports the implementation of the virtual simulation and discusses how such simulations can inform the use of automatic drones for factory inspections.