Thales has been awarded the SILOUET 3(*) support contract by SIMMAD, the integrated structure at the French Defense 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 (photo), 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 optimizing support performance for the French Armed Forces.

 is the French Defense Ministry's integrated through-life support structure for aeronautical equipment and systems. The organization manages support for 1,300 fixed and rotary-wing aircraft of 46 different types owned by the three branches of the armed forces, the French defense procurement Agency (DGA), the Gendarmerie Nationale and civil defense agencies. SIMMAD has responsibility for technical, logistical and procurement aspects of through-life support in order to optimize support provision and delivery.

Managing a budget of nearly €1.8 billion, SIMMAD places or renews approximately 250 procurement contracts a year and works with more than 300 private contractors, of which 42 are subsidiaries of 8 major industrial groups.


(*) SILOUET: Soutien Industriel à la Logistique Opérationnelle et aux Utilisateurs d’Équipements Thales (contractor support for operational logistics and users of Thales equipment)