People Category: Panelist

Maxime Gariel

Maxime Gariel is the Chief Technology Officer at Xwing, an aviation company on a mission to radically improve human mobility through the use of fully autonomous airplanes. Maxime is a pilot whose lifelong dream is to make airplanes fly themselves. Prior to Xwing, Maxime was the Principal GNC (Guidance, Navigation & Control) Engineer at Rockwell Collins where he designed and built autonomous aircraft systems like DARPA Gremlins and the AgustaWestland SW4 Solo autonomous helicopter. Before becoming Chief Engineer of the SW4 Solo’s flight control system, he was in charge of the system architecture, redundancy, and safety for the project. Prior to Rockwell Collins, he worked on ADS-B based conflict detection as a Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT and on autoland systems for airliners at Thales. Maxime earned his MS and PhD in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech and his BS from ISAE-Supaéro (France).

Brian Smith

Dr. Brian Smith is a Lockheed Martin Senior Fellow. He supports research efforts in CFD methods, turbulence modeling, flow control and aero-optics at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company in Fort Worth, Texas. He has developed, implemented and supported the application of the RANS and scale resolving models for Lockheed aircraft programs. He developed unique 3-D riblet configurations for turbulent boundary layer drag reduction. He is also the lead inventor of microvanes for aft fuselage drag reduction, a flow control concept demonstrated on the C-130. He leads efforts in CFD simulation and control of platform induced aero-optics. He is an AIAA Fellow and currently leads the Physical Modeling swim lanes for the Roadmap Subcommittee of the AIAA CFD 2030 Integration Committee. Dr. Smith received his AB degree in Engineering from Brown University and his PhD in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University.