May 2, 2005 – THALES Avionics won IFE orders worth more than $130 million last year, Thales Group’s senior VP for aerospace told Aviation Week and Space Technology in a recent interview.

Francois Quentin went on to say that most of that business was won in the last quarter of 2004 and that he expected the result to be closer to $400 million for this year. The IFE share of Thales aerospace division’s overall sales was expected to double to more than 10 per cent in the coming years, he added.

A recent wave of wins has enabled Thales to double its market share to 25 per cent, according to Quentin, largely at the expense of Rockwell Collins. Quentin also asserted that development of Thales’ TopSeries i4000 and i5000 systems was at least a year ahead of that of comparable systems from Panasonic.

He pointed to the airframers’ policy of limiting the number of qualified suppliers as a source of significant future business for Thales. Only Thales and Panasonic have been selected to supply IFE systems for the Airbus A380, for example, and Boeing is expected to adopt a similar stance on the 787.

Quentin acknowledged that system reliability had been a significant problem for IFE suppliers in the past and said that the company was aiming for an in-service availability rate of better than 99.4 per cent for i4000/i5000.

Quentin confirmed earlier reports that Thales was working on the application of wireless to IFE under the rumoured system designation “i7000”. He said that Thales was talking to both Airbus and Boeing about wireless, and that requests for proposals for the 787 were likely to be issued later this year.