Mission Control System Team Member

NEW YORK, NY, USA - AdaCore joins Boeing, Smiths Aerospace, and Wind River Systems in celebrating the maiden flight of Boeing’s advanced aerial refueling tanker, the Italian Air Force KC-767A, which took place on May 21, 2005. AdaCore serves as a key member of Smiths Aerospace’s development team for the tanker’s mission control system (MCS), which manages the aircraft’s unique flight guidance, navigation, and communications capabilities. The Italian Air Force was Boeing’s first KC-767 customer, ordering four of the world's newest and most advanced tankers.

The KC-767 MCS is the first avionics application in flight to use the Software Common Operating Environment (SCOE), which consists of a safety-critical-certified ARINC653 operating system from Wind River, the GNAT Pro for VxWorks 653 Ada compilation system from AdaCore, and infrastructure software developed by Smiths Aerospace.

"AdaCore was chosen as a key member of the SCOE development team after an extensive evaluation of several Ada compiler vendors," said Dudrey Smith, manager of support software at Smiths Aerospace. “Over the multi-year development, AdaCore has proven instrumental in the success of both the ‘SCOE’ and the 767 Tanker program."

AdaCore was specifically selected by the MCS development team for its superior technical expertise with both Ada compilation systems and with avionics application development environments. With fast compilation speed, quality code generation, and an extensive set of switches and pragmas (compilation control directives), AdaCore’s GNAT Pro specifically addressed the KC-767’s need for mission-critical robustness and flexibility.

"The close cooperation between AdaCore and Wind River that enabled the successful development of the Boeing KC-767 mission control system demonstrates the value real partnerships bring to the development of device software," said John Fanelli, vice president of products, Wind River. "With device software complexity rising exponentially, only dedicated partnerships that provide true technology integration and optimization of best-of-breed products will provide companies like Smiths Aerospace and Boeing with the technology to deliver their products faster, better, at lower cost and more reliably."

In addition to flight-management tasks, the KC-767 MCS takes in such data as flight control, fuel storage and fuel flow as well as refueling orbit patterns, rendezvous points,and other mission-specific data. The KC-767 MCS consists of two flight-management computers (FMCs) connected to multipurpose control display units (MCDUs). The VME-based MCS computer is implemented using a dual, open architecture with an ARINC653-compliant partitioned operating system that enhances safety-critical redundancy and isolation through temporal, physical and bandwidth segregation (schedule, memory and I/O throughput).

“The partitioned-OS tanker project is a perfect illustration of how mission-critical aerospace systems must be architected to ensure safety-critical compliance and reliability,” said Robert Dewar, president of AdaCore. “The successful first flight of the KC-767 is the culmination of an exceptional effort put forth by the entire development team.”

About AdaCore

Founded in 1994, AdaCore is the leading provider of commercial, open-source software solutions for Ada, a modern programming language designed for large, long-lived applications where reliability, efficiency and safety are absolutely critical. AdaCore's flagship product is GNAT Pro, the commercial-grade open-source Ada development environment, which comes with expert online support and is available on more platforms than any other Ada technology. AdaCore has customers customers worldwide; see our customers page for more information.

Use of Ada and GNAT Pro continues to grow in high-integrity and safety-critical applications, including commercial and defense aircraft avionics, air traffic control, railroad systems, financial services and medical devices. AdaCore has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris.

Press Contact
press@adacore.com