Schneider Electric Expands Weather Services to Rockwell Collins for its ARINC Direct Offering

Schneider Electric has expanded its agreement with Rockwell Collins to significantly upgrade weather services for the company’s ARINC Direct which provides private jet owners and operators with flight planning, communications, international trip support and fueling solutions.

Under the expanded agreement, Schneider Electric will provide its new Flight Hazards solution suite to ARINC Direct customers. The Flight Hazards solution, part of Schneider Electric’s graphical weather tool, incorporates enhanced forecasts for turbulence, icing and thunderstorms and provides the accuracy and resolution needed for safer and more efficient flight operations. These patent-pending forecasts are the first of its kind in the commercial aviation weather industry.

The cornerstone of the predictive technology is the eddy dissipation rate (EDR) turbulence forecast. Turbulence is one of the most difficult aviation weather phenomena to predict and the Flight Hazards product delivers a global higher resolution and more accurate forecast to better plan for a safe and efficient flight.

Turbulence:  The enhanced turbulence forecast is an EDR based forecast that integrates mountain wave, boundary layer, convective and clear air turbulence (CAT) into a single forecast product.

Icing:  The enhanced icing forecast tools provide a quantitative metric for aircraft performance loss based on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) research that can be applied to ice accumulation for specific airfoils.

Thunderstorms:  The enhanced thunderstorm forecast provides a global forecast and also identifies storm intensity within a region allowing customers to make small corrections to flight paths instead of avoiding large areas.

Schneider Electric has previously supplied ARINC Direct with its Global Aviation geographic information system (GIS) weather shape files for their tools and applications. Using tools and applications from Schneider Electric, ARINC Direct is provides flight following tools to their clients with the necessary aviation weather information in order to provide safe and efficient flight planning.