Thales : and Météo-France form partnership to provide ECOsystem customers with global weather services

At World ATM Congress 2017, Thales, world leader in Air Traffic Management, announces an agreement with Météo-France, international supplier of meteorological information systems, to integrate global weather services into Thales's ECOsystemdecision support platform for improved aviation operations.

Key Points

• Thales and Météo-France signed an agreement to integrate global weather services into ECOsystem.
• With the ability to anticipate severe weather, ECOsystem users experience reduced traffic disruption, increased passenger comfort, and more predictable air traffic controller and pilot peak work load.
• At World ATM Congress 2016, Thales launched ECOsystem's first application, Advanced Traffic Flow Management, and in 2017, is launching the second application, Unmanned Aerial System Traffic management.

In many areas around the world, air traffic control is performed without the ability to account for the impact of severe weather phenomena like thunderstorms, leaving the pilots managing weather avoidance, and leaving Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) developing reactive measures based on pilots' requests.

By embedding Météo-France weather data into ECOsystem and leveraging the platform's Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) application, ANSPs receive high accuracy prediction of severe weather activity en route and at airports, enabling severe weather mitigation to move from being reactive to proactive. The result is shorter avoidance routes; reduced fuel consumption and CO2 emissions; better adaptation of ATC sectorization plans and ATCO workload to actual airspace capacity; and better tuning of weather-induced regulations, resulting in reduced ground delays. Analysis performed during the SESAR TOPLINK Large Scale Demonstration estimated 1 million minutes of ground delay holding could be eliminated in Europe, delivering a potential cost benefit of up to 50 M€.

Thales is committed to partnering with customers and industry leaders to propel our innovation from concept to reality. ECOsystem, augmented by Météo-France weather data, is one example. With the infusion of high-quality weather observations and predictions, ECOsystem ATFM can provide the aviation community with superior flow management, optimizing airspace capacity and efficiency.
Jean-Marc Alias, Thales Vice President in Charge of ATM business In addition to ANSP benefits, Airport operators will benefit from better anticipation of airport runway capacity reduction, as well as improved support to weather-dependent decisions, such as runway configuration changes or deicing needs.

Lastly, Airlines will benefit on the ground (flight dispatchers) and in the cockpit (pilots) as a result of anticipated flight management decisions in regard to severe weather avoidance.

This commercial partnership is an extension of joint Thales and Météo-France research activities conducted since 2011 for the TOPMET and TOPLINK SESAR projects.

'This partnership with THALES allows Météo-France to propose its forecasts on the globe to users of the whole world. Indeed with ECOsystem, all the aeronautical actors can benefit from meteorological information integrated into their tools.'
Emmanuel Cloppet, Head of the sales management, Météo -France