ARINC Engineering Services Named Prime Contractor By NASA for Flight Critical Systems Work

Annapolis, MD — ARINC Engineering Services, LLC, (AES) has been named a prime contractor by NASA for support of aircraft flight critical systems research. A wholly-owned defense subsidiary of ARINC Incorporated, AES will compete with four other primes for task orders under a recent indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity award with a potential value of $35 million over 5 years.

ARINC has special recent experience in developing advanced integrated health management systems for aircraft. The company developed a prototype system known as ACAMS for automatically diagnosing and predicting aircraft faults prior to failure. The system fuses information from flight and sensor data to perform the analysis, and was flight tested on NASA's 757 aircraft under a similar NASA contract.

"The fact they awarded AES prime contractor status along with several aerospace giants means NASA has identified the expertise of the ARINC team as being well-matched to the tasks they expect to award," stated Dr. Renée Kent, AES Program Director, Army & Advanced Applications.

In announcing the awards, NASA said tasks under the contract will cover support of flight critical systems development and integration, as well as flight dynamics, guidance and control, crew systems and aviation operations, and reliable and robust avionics systems. The tasks will be accessible to all five primes. In addition to AES, these include the Boeing
Company Phantom Works, Seattle; Honeywell Corporation, Minneapolis; Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, Fort Worth, Texas; and Rannoch Corporation of Alexandria, Va.

"Getting to this stage is a big step," continued Dr. Kent. "ARINC Engineering Services has assembled a highly-qualified, multi-disciplinary team of subcontractors that covers the gamut of technical aspects NASA is looking for in this effort. We can point to successful collaboration with NASA on a number of Flight Critical Systems breakthroughs in the past."

The ARINC team of subcontractors includes Analytical Systems and Materials; AeroTech Research; Calspan; Drexel University; EmbeddedPlus Engineering; Luna Innovations; Pennsylvania State University; Scientific Systems Company, Inc.; Symetrics Industries; TechnoSciences; United Air Lines; and Wyle Laboratories Inc.

SOURCE: ARINC Incorporated