Thales Aerospace Division Aerospace Services Worldwide www.thalesgroup.

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THALES / SMITHS TopFlight FMS certified on A330/A340 and A320 families of aircraft
Dear Customer, We are pleased to inform you that the Topflight Flight Management System developed by Thales and Smiths Aerospace has been granted type certificate by Airbus on Long Range aircraft families. This certification of the latest Topflight FMS software load referred to "Rev2" on A330/A340 follows certification obtained earlier of the same Rev2 software on Single Aisle aircraft. The Thales / Smiths Topflight FMS has now accumulated almost 2,000,000 flight hours since initial certification in august 2002. The latest software load, "Rev2" demonstrated excellent performance during the in-service evaluation with more than 50,000 hours flown on 90 aircraft. It received many positive comments from pilots, for its exclusive features, excellent robustness and reliability. This certification concludes seven years of development by teams of Airbus, Thales and Smiths Aerospace of a state-ofthe-art new generation Flight Management System. Topflight FMS is available for both Single Aisle and Long Range Airbus aircraft, as a Supplier Furnished Equipment (SFE) for both forward fit (RFC) or retrofit (RMO) installations. Topflight FMS has already been selected by more than 50 airlines for forward fit or retrofit installation worldwide. The result of this partnership is the Topflight FMS, which performances go beyond any other competing system to deliver new efficiencies to the aircraft operations. This advanced system provides the right tactical tools within the CNS/ATM environment, enabling strategic and tactical management of the flight.

Topflight answers current and future operators' needs

The development teams made the choice right from the start to use only the most advanced hardware and software technologies, with its dual high-speed processors and use of LCD for man-machine interface. Topflight offers a worldwide database thanks to an increased memory capacity, and has been designed to allow generous hardware and software growth capacity to cope with future functionalities.

Why a new FMS?

After 20 years of service, the previous generation FMS1 had reached its limits and new tools were required to solve air traffic density problems, as per the ICAO recommendations for FANS. Thales and Smiths Aerospace merged their expertise to offer on Airbus a FMS of second generation; common to the Airbus Single Aisle (A318/319/320/321) and Long Range (A330/340) aircraft families.

Thales Avionics S.A. - February 2006 - Photo credit: Airbus S.A.S

From Rev1 to Rev2+: the road to maturity

Topflight was firstly certified in 2002 in its Rev1 standard. Like any other avionics system of this complexity, Topflight had its teething pains: out of the 1,000,000 lines of code of the initial software, some bugs were identified by the first users of Rev1. Thanks to the in service evaluation with operators before deployment, they were quickly analyzed and corrected with the help of Airbus and those early users in the Rev1+, Rev2 and now Rev2+ version. Rev2+ is the final mature Topflight functional content that will be deployed in 2006, based on the experience gained on the Rev2 standard. With Rev2 and Rev2+ versions, Thales introduces new functionalities and offers a common system to Airbus Single Aisle and Long Range fleet. Philippe CAMBON, Topflight FMS Program Manager at Thales, comments on the development of Topflight. "The improvement plan we defined in collaboration with our launch customers and with Airbus, has proven to be efficient and demonstrated good results with the certification of Rev2. Our system operates at the lowest reset rate ever achieved." "Rev2+ will bring an improved Human-Machine Interface to simplify crew tasks, thus optimising the use of the temporary flight plan", explains Philippe CAMBON. "Topflight is designed to grow with future operators' needs. We are already working on the future Release 1A version, which represent the next functional load of the FMS2 defined by Airbus. This future standard will provide RNP 0.1 accuracy for approach, take off, and go around, and will allow standard Noise Abatement Procedures, as per air traffic management new requirements. It will also include a Navigation database of 7 Mb capacity, taking advantage of the high speed Ethernet data loading capability: Topflight is really an upgradeable system", says Philippe CAMBON.

Philippe CAMBON FMS program manager

At the end of 2005, about 650 aircraft of the Single Aisle and the Long Range families were flying the Topflight FMS within the fleet of 50 operators. The Controlled Entry Into Service of Rev2 showed excellent results in terms of reliability and positive feed back from pilots.

Topflight: Voted best by pilots

Pilots especially enjoy Topflight specific features, like the three flight plans with predictions, the multiple revision capability on the temporary flight plan and the improved STAR stringing rules. The unique "What You See Is What You Fly" concept has been especially appreciated since it allows airlines to operate more efficiently in dense terminal areas. Captain Joseph Gilroy, A320 Captain Instructor in one major US airline, finds that the Topflight FMS has many new and desirable features and states, "the new temporary flight plan can be used to evaluate changes prior to insertion and the "once undo then erase" function is an efficient tool that can be used to fix mistakes." He further states that "the significantly enhanced "Direct To" function now includes an option to place "Abeam Points" on the flight plan that improves fuel management and pilot awareness."
Thales Avionics S.A. - February 2006

On the same tone, Air France Captain Michel Landrin, Airbus Fleet Technical Chief Pilot, really appreciated that, with Topflight, the secondary flight plan is now a fully functional flight plan, for which predictions are computed and which sequences with the active flight plan when the active legs are the same. Air France pilots use this feature to keep an arrival procedure and an approach to a parallel runway instantly available should the need to change arise. Pilots having flown Topflight, like Captain Gilroy and Captain Landrin, agree on the fact that the system reduces their workload and combines the flight with economical constraints visibility. The temporary flight plan with " 4 D " predictions is a genuine "What If?" tool, enabling the crew to assess the impact in terms of Time and/or Fuel of any planned re-routing. This carries an economical dimension to their decision-making on a flight-by-flight, day-by-day case. "Now the secondary can be used to evaluate changes to the route and their impact on ETA and EFOB", said Captain Gilroy.

Topflight FMS is an efficient tool for tactical management of the flight

A High performance hardware

Designed from the start with performance in mind, the Topflight FMS architecture is based on two high-speed 32-bit processors - the FM processor (FMP) and the Interface and Display processor (IDP) - for a better repartition of the workload. Each processor is specialized in specific types of tasks, which simplifies maintenance and evolution management. The FMP-IDP separation allows interface and display changes without impacting the core FM software. Furthermore, Topflight offers a generous 5Mb of navigation database capacity, unmatched by any other system on Airbus. This capacity is going to be even bigger for the Release 1A standard, with an unprecedented 7Mb capacity1, large enough to host a complete worldwide navigation database. The man-machine interface of Topflight is the new generation LCD-based MCDU, using quad pixel arrangement along with an anti reflective coating, white glass technology, providing significant advantages versus obsolescent CRT MCDU, among others, a 15% increased viewing area, up to 50% parallax improvement, four times higher reliability and 50% reduction in weight and power consumption.
Thales Avionics S.A. - February 2006

Solving the reset issue

Software resets have been for years a real issue in previous generation FMS. Thales has introduced with Topflight a new design to handle software resets, allowing the system to reach today the lowest reset rate in the industry, with the outstanding performance of 1 reset every 1990 Flight hours2.

1 Set by soft parameters 2 Degraded resets with potential cockpit effects, by September 2005

A configurable system: Airline Modifiable Information (AMI)

The FMS2 flexible design enables the operators to customize many options according to their own policy on fuel management, AOC and auto-prints. The customized configuration is loaded in the FMS through the Airline Modifiable Information files (AMI). Thales has developed specific forms and tools to assist the airlines in specifying their choices of AMI parameters. These documents are available through your regular Thales contact.

Navigation Databases
Navigation databases are independently loadable and cross loadable. Another innovation of Topflight is that operators can now contract directly with their choice of navigation database supplier, which can either be EAG, Jeppesen, or Lido. For some database sources, the operators can benefit from a common A320/B737 navigation database. A choice of Navigation databases providers: Provider
WEB Contact Name TEL FAX E-MAIL

EAG
European Aeronautical Group (Formerly Thales Avionics Ltd)
www.euronautical.com

JEPPESEN

LIDO
LIDO Lufthansa Systems FlightNav (Formerly Lido FlightNav)

www.jeppesen.com

http://www.lhsystems.com

John Hill +44 (0)1932 704211 +44 (0)1932 267574

john.hill@euronautical.com

Greg Olsen +1 303 328-4232 +1 303 328-4116

greg.olsen@jeppesen.com

Albert Schmid +41 44 8286 551 +41 44 8286 599

albert.schmid@zrh.lido.net

Pilot's guide & desktop trainers

Thales is pleased to introduce the full-color Pilot Guide for the Topflight FMS. This guide was developed by pilots for pilots and gives a detailed step-by-step approach to the functionalities of the FMS. It is an excellent tool for instructors as well as for line pilots. The Topflight pilot's guide is available for both Rev 1 and Rev 2 software versions of the FMS, in both paper and CD ROM format. And for better pilot hands-on FMS familiarization, 2-D Desktop trainers for Topflight are also available from independent manufacturers.

Photo courtesy of FAROS SA Thales Avionics S.A. - February 2006

Acknowledgements
Credit photos Thales, Airbus, X

Thales and Smiths Aerospace wish to express in this letter their thanks and appreciation to all airline personnel and Airbus staff who worked with us to make this FMS as successful as it is today, especially, our friends at Frontier Airlines, Alitalia, Air France and Northwest Airlines.

Contact
For more information on the Topflight FMS, please contact us at: marketing.asw@fr.thalesgroup.com