Flight Management Systems

Optimized navigation & trajectory control for aviation

Air defence
Civil Aviation
Airspace management

The Flight Management System (FMS) is the heart of navigation, enabling flight preparation, calculating and delivering flyable trajectories to the crew, setting flight parameters and ensuring aircraft guidance as the flight plan progresses.

FORCES

Trusted Navigation Core

Thales FMS equips over 7,000 aircraft with precise navigation and trajectory control, reducing pilot workload and enhancing safety across all flight phases from take-off to approach.
Intuitive Pilot Interface

Easy-to-use FMS interface with smart features like "what-if" planning, trajectory preview, and undo function, allowing faster flight prep and lower training time for optimized pilot efficiency.
Future-Ready with PureFlyt

Selected by Airbus, Thales PureFlyt brings eco-efficient features like Continuous Descent, enhanced trajectory tools, and secure connectivity for tomorrow’s greener, smarter flights.

More than 40 years' FMS experience at Thales

At Thales, the first FMS was developed for the A320 and was known as FMS300. Other systems have been developed for the regional and helicopter markets. These systems, known as FMS200, are well known on aircraft such as the ATR-600 or the UH60V Black Hawk helicopter.

Thales now supplies equipment for more than 500 aircraft per year. Pilots around the world trust our FMS products for a full-featured FMS that provides accurate navigation calculations and and precise trajectory control.

Why do pilots find Thales FMS efficient? Thales FMS users benefit from a dramatic reduction in pilot workload and time spent on FMS operations. The intuitive interface makes it easy to perform basic tasks such as creating new waypoints along the route which may include unique descent altitude constraints. More complex tasks such as creating a custom 3-dimensional arrival to any airport or location are equally easy.

FEATURES

• What you see is what you fly: Navigation Display interface including scrolling mode and trajectory display.

• Temporary and multiple secondary Flight Plans for “what-if” scenarios.

• Undo function to discard flight plan modifications.

• Reduced pilot workload during all phases of flight (take-off, climb, cruise, descent and approach) is realized when the FMS is fully coupled (LNAV & VNAV) to the autopilot

To establish, manage and optimise the flight plan in terms of flight time and fuel consumption, the FMS relies on two databases: the navigation database (NDB) and the aircraft performance database. To generate the onboard database, Thales adapts this format using tools developed in strict compliance with a process called RTCA DO-200/EUROCAE ED-60, which guarantees the origin and integrity of data loaded into the database. The NDB must be regularly updated to stay compatible with changes to infrastructures and air operations. All NDBs are updated across an airline fleet according to a 28-day AIRAC (Aeronautical Information Regulation and Control) cycle defined by the ICAO.

For Navigation Database from major providers or aircraft performance database from OEMs, Thales masters the process to generate such kind of data.

The Pureflyt FMS is the most innovative and powerful Flight Management System built by Thales, soonly available on the market (2026). It was selected by Airbus in 2022 and will be adapted to fit with Airbus specificities onboard the A320 and A330.

This next generation flight management systems (FMS) will bring at the entry-into-service new features for greener and more economical flights like Continuous Descent Approach, Flight Criteria management, more tools for what-if scenarios and a cyber-secured bi-way connectivity to the open world.