The origins of the company date back to the incorporation of Redifon in the United Kingdom in 1946. In 1948, the company moved to the then new town of Crawley in West Sussex. In 1981, the parent company British Electric Traction changed the company name to Rediffusion Simulation Limited to take advantage of the then familiar Rediffusion brand name. In 1988, the company was bought by Hughes Aircraft and renamed Hughes Rediffusion Simulation. In 1994, the company was taken over by Thomson-CSF, who merged it with Link Miles and renamed the company Thomson Training & Simulation. The merged companies were based at the Manor Royal site at Crawley. In 1998, the simulation business of Wormald Technology of Australia was bought and renamed Thales Training & Simulation Pty Ltd. In the United States, Burtek, bought in 1979 by Thomson-CSF, was renamed Thomson Training & Simulation Inc. At the end of 2000, the company was renamed Thales Training & Simulation when the parent company re-branded using the Thales name. Thales sold its civilian fixed-wing simulation business to L-3 Link Simulation & Training UK in August 2012. The purchase included part of the TTS Crawley plant, but not Thales' military rotary-wing simulation business.
Operations
Thales Training & Simulation has four main manufacturing plants:
France responsible for the military aircraft, military helicopter and land vehicle simulation product ranges;
Germany where the small arms trainers are manufactured;
Australia which addresses Australasia requirements.
In addition, the company has joint ventures and/or customer support hubs in the United States, Saudi Arabia, China, etc.
Products and services
Thales have built and now operate numerous types of aircraft simulators, including:
Fixed based — No motion platform, normally housed in a dome, commonly military application. Full flight simulators can also be fixed based, these are generally basic training devices that have no visual and are control trainers only.
Full flight simulators — A fully immersed simulation that has a motion platform, can be either hydraulic or electric.
Military simulators — These can simulate parts of aircraft, water based vehicles or ground systems, they are designed to simulate the look and/or feel of the environment.
The range of services offered in support of military simulators now extends to both PFI and PPP contracts. Thales Training & Simulation provides the Synthetic training service for Tornado GR4Royal Air Force Pilots and Navigators. A similar service is provided to train Army Air Corps Lynx Mk 7 & Mk 9 Pilots. A further Thales training service took over the operation of several existing Royal Air Force Simulator training centres, Nimrod MR Mk2, C130K, VC10, Tristar, Tucano, Jaguar, Tornado F3 and SeaKing Mk3, under a PPP arrangement. As the PFI model has been adopted outside the UK, Thales is also part of a consortium to supply NH90 helicopter synthetic training to the German airforce under a PFI framework. Thales Training & Simulation has a joint venture with Eurocopter running a synthetic helicopter training facility, Helisim.
Thales also manufactures driver simulators for trucks, busses and military vehicles including tanks.
The range of simulators extends to nuclear power plant simulators and small arms simulators for training army, police, etc.
