12 May 2009

The final presentation of FlySafe will take place on 29 May in the Newton 2 meeting room at ESA's ESTEC facility in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. All interested parties are invited to attend.

FlySafe aims at establishing a bird-warning system to improve flight safety in northwest Europe for military Air Force operations. FlySafe will deliver a proof-of-concept information system to generate quasi real-time information and forecast of bird migration at various spatial and temporal scales by combining various space and terrestrial assets.

Bird strikes on aircraft pose a real safety threat for both military and civil aviation. Depending on specific circumstances such as the speed of the aircraft, the point of impact, the mass of the bird, the number of birds and the type of aircraft, bird strikes can result in devastating accidents. The annual cost of bird strikes due to damage and delays for the civilian aviation is estimated to be between 1 and 2 billion Euro.

Several issues are being addressed in FlySafe. They include:

• Federation and coordination of the users and their requirements
• Standardisation
• Interoperability
• Increase efficiency of operational systems
• Development of forecast models

Space technologies play an important role for the characterization of global movements of birds by indirectly providing a number of environmental parameters such as; initiation of migration, stopover behaviour, shortage of foods and other parameters used to model and predict bird migration.

ARTES 20 IAP –  the Integrated Applications Promotion programme – initiated FlySafe in June 2007 in partnership with Dutch, Belgium, French and German Air Forces and in cooperation with industry and research institutes from several European countries. It is one of the first activities launched during the preparatory phase of the IAP programme.

All those interested in attending the final presentation of FlySafe are asked to send an email to iap@esa.int. Please enter  “FlySafe Final Presentation” as the subject header or title of your email.

A final presentation agenda and further information can be found in the related links in the top right column of this page. For directions to ESTEC, click here.

This ITT for an IAP Feasibility Study aims at assessing the feasibility, viability and added value of space assets (esp. earth observation data and satellite navigation/positioning tools) for developing predictive risk maps and GIS for mosquito surveillance, control and study in Europe.

You may obtain further information of this ITT on the ESA EMITS website, with the menu "Open Invitations to Tender" under the ITT number AO6088.

A successful conference of ministers in charge of space activities has secured an on-going commitment to the ESA Telecommunications and Integrated Applications Directorate activities, including approval for the start of two new programmes, one of which is the Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) Programme (ARTES element 20, Phase 1).

The two-day conference (25-26 November 2008) resulted in resounding approval and continued support for telecommunications activities.