AirAsia has tapped Thales for the supply of avionics systems on its new fleet of 304 Airbus A320neos. The systems include TopFlight flight management systems, Thales/ACSS T3CAS2 traffic collision avoidance systems, low range radio altimeters and emergency location transmitters. The contract also covers an agreement for long-term repair-by-the-hour support.
“The Asian aviation market is one of the most competitive in the world. Carriers like AirAsia must strive to the highest levels of aircraft utilization and efficiency in order to succeed,” says Eric Huber, VP and general manager of Avionics Services Worldwide for Thales. “As a result, they require an avionics components developer and [maintenance, repair and overall] network they can trust to deliver to the highest standards and with near perfect reliability.”
The two companies have been working together since 2005. AirAsia’s entire Airbus fleet is equipped with Thales solutions.
Thales’ FMS includes hardware combined with the latest-certified Airbus Release 1A software. It features secondary flight plan and realistic navigation trajectory computations for flight management systems landing system capabilities to flight crew. Thales’ surveillance solution integrates the collision avoidance system with a terrain awareness and warning system and a transponder in a single 6MCU box. Thales says it offers required navigation performance – authorization required, airborne traffic situational awareness capability, runway overrun protection system full compliance and the first ADS-B Out DO-260B-compliant transponder on the market.