MESA, ARIZONA, Feb. 15, 2017 – Ongoing efforts to enhance the capabilities of all U.S. military aircraft received a boost last week at Arizona State University (ASU) during the 2017 Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Consortium members’ meeting, co-hosted by GECO Inc. and ASU.
The Open Group FACE™ Consortium is a government and industry partnership that provides standardized, open approaches for defining the avionics environment for military airborne platforms. This meeting provided opportunities for industry and government experts to discuss and share information critical to achieving that goal.
Industry co-host GECO, a rapidly growing aerospace technology company, is a member of the consortium and is actively working to stimulate innovation throughout the industry. One of the company’s most recent contract wins is to support a universal controller for unmanned aerial systems, which incorporates FACE concepts. This year marks the first time an education partner has been a co-host of the meeting that brought together more than 150 experts for three days of discussions.
“Improving open avionics standards, best practices and business models are critical to keeping costs down while fielding capabilities faster,” said George Graves, Chief Technology Officer of GECO. “We fully support the FACE consortium goal of affordable, reusable software, and we were proud to team with Arizona State University to host this important gathering.”
Graves stressed that the consortium’s approach of standardizing software standards “gives our customers access to the best value products by incorporating affordability through FACE principles.”
FACE objectives include encouraging innovation and competition within the avionics industry, lowering implementation costs, and promoting the use of standard interfaces that will lead to reuse of capabilities.
GECO is one of numerous consortium members that represent all disciplines within the industry. The consortium also includes the Air Force Research Laboratory, NAVAIR and the U.S. Army PEO Aviation. GECO’s innovative products support numerous aerospace platforms, including the U.S. Air Force’s KC-46A Pegasus tanker aircraft, the U.S. Army’s AH-64E Apache combat helicopter and commercial electronic flight instrumentation systems.
The FACE Technical Standard
FACE Technical Standard is the open avionics standard for making military computing operations more robust, interoperable, portable and secure. The standard enables developers to create and deploy a wide catalog of applications for use across the entire spectrum of military aviation systems through a common operating environment. The latest edition of the standard further promotes application interoperability and portability with enhanced requirements for exchanging data among FACE components and emphasis on defining common language requirements for the standard.
About
GECO is a proven designer and manufacturer of affordable avionics, to include hardware and software for a wide range of critical aerospace environments. Founded in 1995, GECO is a woman-owned small business.
