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 ECOsystem¹ decision support platform for improved aviation operations.  

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€.

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 MétéoFrance 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 

¹. Leveraging more than 10 years of research and technology innovation, ECOsystem moved from concept to reality to enable ANSPs, airlines and airport operators to plan, monitor, manage and assess aviation operations for better decisions and better results. Through a suite of tools and predictive analytics, stakeholders optimize their operations, as well as contribute to global optimization through data sharing and collaborative applications. Further, ECOsystem is configurable to the customers’ operational requirements, from a global cloud-hosted service, to a local singlefacility deployment.