Leonardo, Thales Team Up For New-Gen Flight Data Processing System ‘Coflight’

The French and Italian major Air Navigation Service providers respectively DSNA (Direction de Services de la Navigation Aérienne) and ENAV (Italian air navigation service provider), alongside industrial partners Leonardo and Thales, confirm their commitment to Coflight, the new generation Flight Data Processing System.

The parties decided to reinforce their cooperation to promote Coflight on the European scene by the establishment of a long-term support and maintenance services contract. This six year-contract will cover all activities necessary for corrective and evolutionary maintenance such as studies, design, software development and associated services.

This represents a significant step to their further technical and commercial collaboration to jointly promote on the European scene innovative schemes for steering Coflight evolution and sharing cost with other Air Navigation Service Providers.

Coflight is designed to meet the Single European Sky and SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) programme objectives. In order to improve flight cost efficiency, optimise the airspace usage and reduce the environmental impact of aviation, a technological breakthrough is required in the domain of Flight Data Processing systems (FDP), the heart of any Air Traffic Management System.

Coflight provides advanced functions like 4D trajectory predictions, interoperability with other systems and datalink capabilities, supporting current and future operational concepts. It offers an open architecture and standardised middleware to guarantee the long-term upgradability and scalability of the product and take into account future services coming from SESAR.