Avionics 09

By Alex Wilson

I am back in the office after a busy few weeks at Embedded World and Avionics 09. I read in the news that the third C-130AMP has its first flight ahead of schedule which is excellent news in these days of doom and gloom over the economy!

The C-130 AMP is a heavy user of our technology, so that prompted me to go ahead and write about Avionics 09. Wind River had a very busy show, with a conference paper, 3 workshops and a master class, which kept us all busy for the two days!

We showcased the EADS DMG-S for the A400M on our stand, which is a great example of moving map application running on VxWorks 653 with ALT OpenGL graphics engine.

Chip Downing gave a great paper on MILS technology during the main conference. I was privileged to chair one of the main conference sessions, introducing Rockwell Collins to talk about HGS, HUD and other displays, and George Romanski of Verocel who gave an update of the work going on for the DO-178C standard - something we are all looking forwards to!

The conference gave some excellent papers and update on various Avionics projects, unfortunately I missed some of the session to give a workshop and Master class. I did catch the keynote by the FAA who covered Future Air Traffic Management (including NexGen), taking us on a "flight" from flightplanning through to the final taxi to the terminal - a fascinating look at infrastructure and avionics for the future ATC system.

This was aligned and expanded by Eurocontrol who did the same for the EU project SESAR, but who expanded this to show how it will align with Military air users and technology. It is good to see these two projects are in alignment, especially as I travel between them quite frequently!

I presented Larry Kinnan's paper on the issues of multicore and certification, which I think was well received - if any one wants a copy of the paper please feel free to email me.

Olivier Charrier presented an overview of IMA certification with George Romanski of Verocel, and also presented a paper with Michael Fries of AdaCore.

We gave a Master Class of developing high performance graphics with Presagis, GE Fanuc and Seaweed, demonstrating the solution running at 60Hz with VAPS XT, VxWorks, GE Fanuc Magic 1 Embedded Computer and Seaweed's Open GL Stack.

All in all I had a very busy show, with customer meetings and presentations, I don't think I had time to walk around the event to see what other stands were showing!

Did you attend the show and what did you think?