Frankeich

Neuil­ly-sur-Seine, 1 Feb­ru­ary 2010 – In Decem­ber 2009, the French Defence Pro­cure­ment Agency (DGA) select­ed Schiebel’s unmanned aer­i­al sys­tem Cam­copter S‑100 to run a series of com­pre­hen­sive tri­als to assess the oper­a­tional advan­tages of a VTOL (Ver­ti­cal Take­off and Land­ing) UAV sys­tem. These tri­als will take place dur­ing the first half of 2010 on var­i­ous sites rep­re­sen­ta­tive of land /urban and coastal oper­a­tions, oper­at­ed by French Army and Navy forces representatives. 

Schiebel’s unmanned aer­i­al sys­tem Cam­copter S‑100 Source: Thales

Lever­ag­ing its exper­tise in air­wor­thi­ness and flight cer­ti­fi­ca­tion, as well as its involve­ment in French and Euro­pean air safe­ty reg­u­la­tions, and its Euro­pean lead­er­ship in Unmanned Air­borne Sys­tems, Thales will sup­port Schiebel in the man­age­ment of these VTOL tri­als. The tests are to take place on a Cam­copter S‑100 fit­ted with a Thales Agile 2 Elec­tro Opti­cal and Infra Red (EO/IR) payload. 

This con­tract rep­re­sents a fur­ther step for­ward in the Euro­pean roadmap for UAV sys­tems and con­firms Thales as a key part­ner in UAV mis­sion systems. 

In its com­pre­hen­sive approach to meet the UAV sys­tem require­ments of Euro­pean forces, Thales is a dri­ving force in the emer­gence of col­lab­o­ra­tive projects, such as WIMAAS (Wide Mar­itime Area Air­borne Sur­veil­lance) intend­ed to facil­i­tate the exchange and fusion of data between pas­sive and active assets. Thales is also involved in the numer­ous research pro­grammes around the inser­tion of UAVs into civ­il air­space like ASTRAEA (UK); MIDCAS (Europe) – sense & avoid, or SIGAT which aims at defin­ing the appro­pri­ate radio fre­quen­cy regard­ing com­mand and con­trol and pay­loads data links for future UAS inte­gra­tion into the Gen­er­al Air Traffic. 

Thales is cur­rent­ly lead­ing the Tech­ni­cal Design Study D2AD – the design and demon­stra­tion of an auto­mat­ic take-off, land­ing and deck land­ing sys­tem for rotor­craft UAVs, set to be a vital com­po­nent of future tac­ti­cal UAV programmes. 

Thales – high per­for­mance mis­sion sys­tems for UAVs. 

About Thales
Thales is a glob­al tech­nol­o­gy leader for the Aero­space and Space, Defence, Secu­ri­ty and Trans­porta­tion mar­kets. In 2008, the com­pa­ny gen­er­at­ed rev­enues of 12.7 bil­lion euros with 68,000 employ­ees in 50 coun­tries. With its 25,000 engi­neers and researchers, Thales has a unique capa­bil­i­ty to design, devel­op and deploy equip­ment, sys­tems and ser­vices that meet the most com­plex secu­ri­ty require­ments. Thales has an excep­tion­al inter­na­tion­al foot­print, with oper­a­tions around the world work­ing with cus­tomers as local partners. 

Text- / Bildquelle (source): Thales
Ansprech­part­ner / con­tact:
Natasha Har­vey
+ 33 1 34 81 40 50
+ 33 6 74 94 23 81
natasha.Harvey@fr.thalesgroup.com
www.thalesgroup.com