14 Oct 09. EADS Defence & Security (DS) will supply the Royal Thai Air Force with its “TransHospital” type of field hospital system, which is designed to provide quick medical care for injured persons in areas without medical facilities. Thanks to this system, Thai rescue services will be able to ensure a quick and reliable response to military and civil emergencies. TransHospital has already demonstrated its operational capabilities during various disaster relief missions. In 2005, for example, it was deployed as a rescue station in the U.S. Gulf Coast for supporting the relief operations following the devastation caused by the hurricanes Katrina und Rita. Another rescue station was set up in Indonesia at the beginning of 2006 for contributing to the relief effort in a region which was particularly hard hit by the tsunami.
“The capability of providing protection and medical treatment on high quality levels is becoming more and more important – not only on the battlefield, but also in disaster areas or during national emergencies,” explains Bernd Wenzler, CEO of Defence Electronics. The TransHospital system can be made fully operational by six persons within a period of only four hours. Subsequently, it can ensure autonomous operation for 72 hours without requiring any logistic support. The system to be delivered to the Royal Thai Air Force has the capacity to treat five in-patients and ten out-patients at the same time. Moreover, for extending capacity, the staff accommodation for ten persons can also be used for patients. Delivery of the system is scheduled for the spring of 2010. Several TransHospital units have already been delivered by Defence Electronics (DE), an integrated activity of DS, to the Bundeswehr and to other armed forces worldwide.
12 Oct 09. First contract award and entry into service for the Coastwatcher 10 radar Developed in partnership with Furuno, the Coastwatcher 10 radar is the latest addition to Thales’s range of coastal surveillance radars. It has been selected as an advanced sensor for the SECMAR project and is a key component of a system designed to ensure the security of goods, people and facilities in a sensitive maritime zone. In June 2009, the radar successfully completed its latest series of tests in Brest. The Coastwatcher 10 will be installed in 2010 at the oil tanker terminal of the Port of Marseille. The SECMAR project—an initiative of the French General Directorate for Enterprises (DGE) and the maritime cluster of the PACA region (Provence, Alpes, Côte d’Azur)—is developing an integrated multi-sensor system to provide protection for civil and military ports or critical infrastructures. Consisting of radar, camera and sonar sensors and a command centre, the system for the SECMAR project will be capable of detecting and identifying asymmetric threats in dense port environments. The Coastwatcher 10 radar, which will be deployed in the port and integrated with optical and acoustic sensors, delivers outstanding performance in the detection and tracking of small surface targets.