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BAE SYSTEMS Real-Time Operating System Selected For C-17 Globemaster III Flight Control Upgrade

06 May 2003

BAE Systems open-architecture real-time operating system has been selected for use on a major upgrade to the flight control system on the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III transport. The company's CsLEOS™ RTOS will underpin the C-17's Modernized Flight Control Computer and Spoiler Control Electronic Flap Computer programmes - two efforts Boeing Integrated Defense Systems recently issued to BAE Systems Platform Solutions under separate awards.

Use of the CsLEOS™ RTOS, along with the artefacts in the available certification package, will allow for the flight control suite to be DO-178B Level A-qualified in support of Global Air Traffic Management (GATM) system requirements. GATM, established by the Federal Aviation Administration in co-operation with the International Civil Aviation Organization, aims to enhance safety in increasingly crowded world-wide air space.

The embedded, open-architecture operating system, which uses "brick-wall" time and memory partitioning in compliance with the ARINC 653 specification, also reduces life-cycle costs by permitting upgrades to be made without recertification of the entire application.

"Boeing and BAE Systems have enjoyed a long relationship on the C-17, with our work on the flight control dating to 1989, and have grown to become the largest avionics supplier on the aircraft," said James Scanlon, president of BAE Systems Platform Solutions. "We are excited about incorporating our real-time operating system into this next phase of the flight control programme." The C-17 is operated by the U.S. Air Force and the U.K Royal Air Force.

The CsLEOS™ operating system is the only commercial, off-the-shelf RTOS offered by a safety-critical systems company. Its brick-wall partitioning allows multiple applications to run on the same system without interfering with each other, ensuring that safety-critical functions are protected from other processes running on the same hardware. The unique design of the CsLEOS™ RTOS provides capabilities that both enhance performance and reduce development efforts:

Multiple scheduling modes - a flexible feature that increases performance by allowing users to switch between different schedule profiles in real time, making it possible to change the schedule of existing applications and/or add new applications on the fly.

Separate loadable images that allow each application to be built and downloaded as a separate program, reducing life-cycle costs and minimising the need for regression testing.

A DO-178B, Level A-certifiable version of the CsLEOS™ RTOS, complete with documentation artefacts to support system certification, is available now. (D0-178B, developed by RTCA Inc., a non-profit company in Washington, D.C., is the international standard for certifying software used in safety-critical airborne systems.)