LONDON – The Total Support Services (TSS) alliance companies, Thales UK, Smiths and SELEX Sensors and Airborne Systems (S&AS) announce a Strategic Partnering Agreement with the Defence Aviation Repair Agency’s (DARA) Electronics business at Sealand, North Wales. The intent of the agreement is to establish the principles that would underpin subsequent long-term service contracts across aircraft platforms on both rotary and fixed wing programmes for the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

“The TSS alliance businesses are working closely with DARA to jointly develop UK military avionics support solutions that will benefit from their combined and unique skills and capabilities,” commented Alan Lewis, DARA’s Commercial Director. “We are delighted to form part of such a dynamic partnership and look forward to its continued development and growth.”

The agreement will offer the best value for the UK MoD by developing innovative support solutions with industry such as the Foxhunter AI24 Radar support team and the migration of test solutions from obsolete equipment to general purpose test equipment. This joint working relationship has already improved radar availability to more than 97%, with year on year cost reductions.

TSS and DARA acknowledge that working together to optimise their individual and complementary skills can potentially reduce cost and create value for money with innovative support solutions to platform primes (i.e. BAE SYSTEMS, AgustaWestland). The leveraging of this industrial capability is in line with the strategic plan of the Defence Logistic Organisation to “Transform Logistic Support”.

This agreement is a prime example that the TSS alliance is moving forward by developing a closer working relationship with DARA, which will enable the parties to jointly develop strategies to help rationalise future UK military avionics support capability. This will ensure that the TSS alliance will be able to provide the most cost effective platform and commodity support solutions. By working with DARA Electronics, TSS will be able to ensure that the strategically important DARA repair capability is best integrated into any support solution. Working with DARA is one of the many steps that TSS is now taking to drive the rationalisation of the UK avionics support base to help the primes and the MoD meet tough affordability and availability improvement targets.

The fundamental principles outlined in the Agreement, which would be adopted in future contractual arrangements, include how the parties:

• Support the Defence Industrial Strategy
• Implement effective contracting processes
• Individually achieve business growth
• Manage and transfer risk
• Develop closer links with platform primes and throughout the supply chain
• Retain a UK industrial base of core skills and technology knowledge
• Identify, develop and implement innovative support solutions
• Incentivise continuous improvement
• Promote openness and trust
• Work together to reduce cost and produce VFM solutions for the MoD
• Develop an efficient communication strategy

TSS was formed between alliance companies Thales UK, Smiths Aerospace and SELEX S&AS, a Finmeccanica company, the end of 2005. Under the alliance the three firms are providing integrated through-life support services for avionics and electrical systems to the primes for MoD rotary and fixed wing aircraft. The alliance will use its extensive domain expertise and established supply chain partnering networks to drive down costs and improve equipment availability.

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