Thales Defensive aids solutions are a fully integrated Self-Protection System for rotary and fixed wing platforms, including transport & mission aircraft, which help to enhance air platform survivability in contested and congested airspace. It ensures the safe return of crews from critical missions, while enabling overall mission level success.
Laser Warning Receiver
Thales's laser warning receiver (LWR) for combat aircraft provides a passive laser warning capability to detect, analyse, locate and track laser threats. It indicates the precise direction of emissions from laser-guided weapons to instantly warn the pilot of impending danger.
The LWR is the laser warning component of the Spectra defensive aids suite developed for the Rafale combat aircraft.
Multi-colour Infrared Alerting Sensor
Co-developed by Thales and Airbus Defence & Space, MIRAS is a passive missile warning system designed for military transport aircraft to counter a complete range of threats from MANPADS to air-to-air missiles.
The system detects and tracks potential threats and instantly issues alerts to aircrews. It has been successfully evaluated against short-range and long-range surface-to-air and air-to-air missiles using bi-colour infrared sensor technology.
Designed to operate in conjunction with countermeasures such as decoy dispensers or directed infrared countermeasures systems (DIRCMs), MIRAS provides spherical coverage to enhance situational awareness and makes a key contribution to the aircraft's self-protection capability.
MIRAS is fully operational and has been proven in combat on Airbus A400M with the French forces and international customers.
Multi-function Threat Warning System
From small arms to large-calibre guns, missiles and RPGs, Elix-IR® offers a unique threat detection, classification and geolocation capability to enhance situational awareness and help keep aircrews safe.
Developed with the UK Ministry of Defence, Elix-IR® is a passive multi-function threat warning system using wide-spectrum colour infrared sensing technology to deliver simultaneous and unimpeded Missile Approach Warning (MAW), Hostile Fire Indication (HFI) and situational awareness from a single sensor system to increase overall platform survivability and mitigate risk to life.
Crews are constantly updated about threat types and locations, with 360° spherical infrared imagery to improve situational awareness.
Elix-IR® is suitable for a wide range of aircraft including helicopters, transport aircraft, UAVs and business jets. It is available in airframe-mounted and podded configurations.
Intelligent Countermeasures Dispensing System
Vicon XF/XF+ provides effective platform protection by implementing passive and/or active electronic countermeasures to enhance platform survivability and increase the probability of mission success. The system supports chaff, flares, expendable active decoys (EADs) and future smart payloads.
Vicon XF/XF+ includes extensively programmable intelligent dispensers to support in-air defined countermeasures techniques. Vicon XF+ features a Smart Stores Communication Interface (SSCI) for communication between the dispenser system and the smart countermeasures as per STANAG 4781, and is capable of dispensing legacy expendables, smart stores and novel payloads.
Over the last 30 years, Thales has supplied more than 700 Vicon XF/XF+ systems for at least 15 different aircraft types in service with more than 20 customers.