Shortly before the AF447 accident, a EU Commision supported project sponsored by Airbus, Dassault and Thales, and known as the NESLIE project was sufficiently advanced to be flight tested on a Citation II by the Nederland National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR). This TAS and AoA laser based system was deemed, following over 40 hours of flight tests in all climatic conditions and up to FL410, to be very promising and further technical work is underway to fine tune the results.
A technical paper detailing the NESLIE flight testing work in PDF format is available
here.
The DANIELA project (also supported by the EU Commission) has taken the NESLIE project one stage further, i.e. the aim of the
DANIELA (Demonstration of ANemometry InstrumEnt based on LAser) project is to prepare the operational use of a flush mounted ADS (Air Data System) built around a 3 axis Doppler LIDAR function as a primary air data channel on civil aircraft, and to assess optical concepts for the measurement of temperature and density to complete the ADS, in a second step.
Overall, these laser based projects are designed to acquire TAS, AOA, density and temperature, as well as being reliable in side-slip situations.