The final presentation of FlySafe will take place on 29 May in the Newton 2 meeting room at ESA's ESTEC facility in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. All interested parties are invited to attend.

FlySafe aims at establishing a bird-warning system to improve flight safety in northwest Europe for military air force operations. FlySafe will deliver a proof-of-concept information system to generate quasi real-time information and forecasts of bird migration at various spatial and temporal scales by combining various space and terrestrial assets.
 
Bird strikes on aircraft pose a real safety threat for both military and civil aviation. Depending on specific circumstances such as the speed of the aircraft, the point of impact, the mass of the bird, the number of birds and the type of aircraft, bird strikes can result in devastating accidents. The annual cost of bird strikes due to damage and delays for civilian aviation is estimated to be €1–2 billion.
 
Several issues are being addressed in FlySafe. They include:

• federation and coordination of the users and their requirements
• standardisation
• interoperability
• increased efficiency of operational systems
• development of forecast models

Space technologies play an important role for the characterisation of global movements of birds, by indirectly providing a number of environmental parameters such as; initiation of migration, stopover behaviour, shortage of food and other parameters used to model and predict bird migration.
 
ARTES 20 – the Integrated Applications Promotion (IAP) programme – initiated FlySafe in June 2007 in partnership with the Dutch, Belgian, French and German air forces and in cooperation with industry and research institutes from several European countries. It is one of the first activities launched during the preparatory phase of the IAP programme.
 
All those interested in attending the final presentation of FlySafe are asked to send an email to iap @ esa.int. Please enter ‘FlySafe Final Presentation’ as the subject header or title of your email.
 
A final presentation agenda and further information can be found under related links in the top right column of this page.