FACE Technical Standard – Driving Commonality in Avionics Systems

Chip Downing is the Senior Market Development Director of Aerospace and Defense at Real-Time Innovations (RTI). In this position he manages RTI’s global aerospace and defense business and helps drive the RTI Connext product, now used in over 1,500 global systems, into the commercial and military aerospace market. Mr. Downing currently serves as the VP, Ecosystem of the DDS Foundation, where he is tasked with growing the sphere of influence of the OMG DDS standard with organizations that have companion specifications. In addition, he also serves as the Chair of the FACE Consortium BWG Outreach Subcommittee, promoting the FACE approach globally. A veteran of the embedded systems industry and an innovator for creating COTS safety certification for commercial RTOSs, he previously served as Senior Director of Aerospace & Defense at Wind River Systems, where he was responsible for the business development of the company’s global A&D markets. During his 14-year Wind River tenure, design wins grew for certified avionics products grew to more than 500 projects. Mr. Downing has also led sales, marketing, and consulting organizations at Esterel Technologies (now Ansys), Validated Software, OnCore Systems, and Mentor Graphics (now Siemens). Mr. Downing has also led sales, marketing, and consulting organizations at Wind River, Esterel Technologies (now Ansys), Validated Software, OnCore Systems, and Mentor Graphics (now Siemens).

Greg McCrea, North Atlantic Industries (NAI), is the Manager of Business Development for North Atlantic Industries (NAI) and is responsible for NAI products for the emerging and evolving military & aerospace electronics market, with current focus on DoD mandates for MOSA, SOSA and FACE conformance. NAI supplies rugged MOSA aligned embedded processing solutions to US Army, Navy and Air Force, and US-aligned foreign military suppliers. Mr. McCrea is an active member of SOSA and FACE Consortiums and supports multiple SOSA technical working groups. His technical background includes 30 years of military electronics products and systems development for space launch vehicles, large scale UAV development, and man-rated safety critical flight controls. Prior to NAI Mr. McCrea worked for 20 years with Boeing Mesa, including managing of electronic flight controls for the Apache helicopter, and managing multiple next generation VTOL VMS / flight control systems development and manufacturing efforts.

Gary Gilliland is a Technical Marketing Manager at DDC-I, where he is responsible for technical marketing functions with an emphasis on the DO-178C safety-critical Deos real-time operating system. He has over 20 years of experience in development and marketing of hardware and software solutions for embedded systems. He has extensive experience with military and commercial avionics and real-time operating systems. Gary is a graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington, where he earned a degree in Electrical Engineering.