Aerospace
Mission impact
Aviation programs carry obligations most sectors never face — safety-critical reliability, export-controlled data, and supply-chain scrutiny that rises with every procurement cycle. By engineering PX4-based flight software through auditable pipelines, proving behavior in simulation before flight, and keeping operational data inside the organization's own boundary, we let manufacturers and operators move at the speed the market demands while producing the evidence regulators and defense buyers require. Compliance is engineered into the delivery system from the start rather than reconstructed for every review.
Aviation is being remade in software. Uncrewed aircraft systems, advanced air mobility, and the autonomy behind them now carry as much program risk in their software supply chains as in their airframes — and the industry is consolidating on open flight-control standards, led by PX4-Autopilot, the permissively licensed autopilot stewarded by the Dronecode Foundation under the Linux Foundation. Wilkes & Liberty delivers the software engineering behind PX4-based aviation programs: flight-stack integration, secure delivery pipelines, simulation-backed test evidence, and sovereign data platforms — built for safety, compliance, and data control.
The challenge
The ground is shifting under aviation programs on three fronts at once. Federal restrictions on foreign-produced aircraft and components are forcing public agencies and their suppliers onto NDAA-compliant, largely PX4-based American platforms. Flight software itself has become a supply-chain concern: defense and enterprise buyers now expect software bills of materials, signed builds, and managed vulnerability response from every vendor in the stack. And the FAA's emerging beyond-visual-line-of-sight framework raises the evidentiary bar — operators and manufacturers must demonstrate, not assert, that their software behaves under failure. Most aviation organizations are strong in hardware and operations but carry these software obligations without a software organization behind them.
How we help
We serve as that software organization — for UAS manufacturers, fleet operators, and aerospace programs building on the PX4 ecosystem.
- PX4 integration and customization — flight-controller board support, MAVLink payload and companion-computer integration, and ROS 2 offboard autonomy on the current PX4 releases.
- The flight-software factory — auditable CI/CD for PX4-based stacks: SBOM generation, signed artifacts, continuous vulnerability watch, and delivery pipelines mapped to NIST SP 800-171 control families — the supply-chain evidence Blue UAS and defense procurement reviews ask for.
- Simulation-backed assurance — automated software-in-the-loop and Gazebo regression pipelines that produce repeatable flight-behavior evidence for safety cases, certification submissions, and government test documentation.
- Secure command and telemetry — authenticated MAVLink links, encrypted telemetry backhaul, and zero-trust ground-segment architecture, so the data link is never the weakest component on the aircraft.
- Sovereign fleet data platforms — ingest, store, and analyze flight, sensor, and operational data inside your own boundary, with full observability and governed AI over your operational data — never exposed to external providers.
- Compliance engineering — NDAA supply-chain posture, Blue UAS Framework alignment, and CMMC/NIST SP 800-171 readiness authored for organizations that build and fly, not for paperwork's sake.
Outcomes
- An auditable, NDAA-defensible software supply chain — SBOMs, signed builds, and vulnerability response your customers can inspect.
- Test evidence on demand: every software change regression-checked in simulation before it approaches an aircraft.
- Operational and autonomy data kept under your control and compliant with export and safety obligations.
- Assurance practices that scale with you toward beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations and defense procurement.
Why Wilkes & Liberty
We build sovereign, inspectable systems for organizations that cannot afford opacity, and we work in the open-source ecosystems our clients depend on. For aviation programs balancing innovation with safety, export control, and procurement scrutiny, that means modern software capability you can audit, evidence you can hand to a reviewer, and infrastructure you — not a vendor — control.
Defense & government relevance
Aligned to the requirements shaping defense UAS procurement: NDAA-compliant supply chains with SBOM and signed-artifact provenance; Blue UAS Framework component alignment; simulation-derived test evidence supporting government acceptance; authenticated command links and zero-trust ground segments; and CMMC/NIST SP 800-171 delivery posture. Engagements are scoped to remain outside ITAR-controlled technical data unless the program requires otherwise — with export-control review as a standing gate.