Thales and SIMMAD announce award of SILOUET 3 avionics support contract for French Armed forces

Thales has been awarded the SILOUET 3[1] support contract by SIMMAD, the integrated structure at the French defence ministry in charge of through-life support for aeronautical equipment.

Under this five-year contract, which will have a maximum value of €112m, Thales will provide technical and logistic support, as well as through-life support for its avionics systems flying on 750 French armed forces fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. This involves managing more than 800 listed items of equipment on 25 aircraft types including Alphajet, ATL2, Gazelle, Mirage 2000, Puma and Tiger.

Building on the experience of the two previous SILOUET agreements, SILOUET 3 is based on a fixed price per hour of flight, offering the flexibility to adapt to operational requirements as the number of flight hours increases or decreases and as fleet formats evolve. Support operations will be managed both by product family across all platform types, and by fleet.

Under the new contract, Thales will be in charge of the entire supply chain and, to provide the closest possible support for users, will set up a dedicated telephone hot line to deal with requests immediately.

With the aircraft covered by the contract expected to log a total of 700,000 flight hours over the life of the contract, SILOUET 3 will help to improve long-term fleet availability. Through this latest agreement, SIMMAD and Thales are continuing to simplify through-life support operations while optimising support performance for the French armed forces.