Praxis Awarded £3million Watchkeeper Contract

Praxis High Integrity Systems (Praxis), a leading specialist in critical systems engineering to the aerospace and defence industry has been awarded a £3million contract to provide safety support to Thales UK for the Watchkeeper Tactical Unmanned Air Vehicle (TUAV) system. The contract will see Praxis take the lead on the entire systems safety engineering, providing safety programme management, systems and human factors safety consultancy into Thales UK's Watchkeeper programme.

Praxis will use its eSafetyCase tools to develop the Safety Case for Watchkeeper. This recent innovation minimises the Cost and Time of safety argument development and simplifies scrutiny by assessors and approvers.

Praxis worked very closely with Thales UK as part of the bid team and during the risk reduction phase, and also assisted Thales UK in obtaining flight clearance to fly the Elbit Hermes 450 UAV, from which the WK450 air vehicle is derived, at Aberporth in 2005 – the first time a large UAV has flown in civil air space.

Keith Williams, Managing Director of Praxis said: "Watchkeeper is a strategic win, reinforcing our position as the safety partner of choice for defence prime contractors wanting to introduce advanced defence technology such as autonomous systems."

Watchkeeper will provide the UK armed forces with an essential Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) capability based on a tactical unmanned air vehicle (UAV) system and will be a key component of the UK's drive for Network Enabled Capability (NEC).

Alex Dorrian, CEO Thales UK said: “This is the latest example of Watchkeeper contracts flowing down to the UK supply chain. Bath based Praxis is a key member of our Watchkeeper team. Their expertise in safety engineering and management is unquestioned and was instrumental in getting flight clearances last September for the first UK flight of the Hermes 450, the UAV on which the WK450 is based.”