Jon S. Drof graduated from Virginia Military Institute in 1984, earning a bachelor’s degree in
Chemistry. He earned his wings of gold as a Naval Flight Officer in 1987 and has flown the EA-6B Prowler, A-6E Intruder, F-14 Tomcat and Turkish F-16C. In addition, he has NATO, Joint and Service Component staff tours.
As a government civilian, his Acquisition assignments include PMA-281, as the Integrated Product Lead for the mission planning software Navy Portable Flight Planning Software. This turn of the century Windows software suite allowed naval platforms to perform routine and combat mission planning; and allowed for ground, afloat and Special Forces assets to conduct routine and combat mission planning. Jon served as Lead in establishing the Joint Mission Planning Software (JMPS) (Expeditionary) mission planning suite. This iteration of JMPS provided greater USMC platform mission planning capability. Moving to PMA-209, as the Integrated Product Lead for the Aeronautical Data Integration and Mission Planning team, he was responsible for the release of the 28-day Digital Aeronautical Flight Information Files (DAFIF) used by the naval aviation fleet to file and fly in the new GPS Airspace worldwide.
Jon’s current assignment is with PMA-209, the Air Combat Electronics Combat Office as the Open Architecture Functional Lead for Aviation Architecture Team (AAT). Jon is responsible in assisting program offices in determining their Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) to Open Architecture implementation. He is an integral member of the Naval Aircraft Weapons Center Aircraft Division’s Open Architecture Working Group. Jon is also the senior navy representative to the FACE and SOSA Consortia - a widely known (defense industry-centric) consensus standards body with membership composed of Government organizations, acquirers, suppliers, tool vendors, integrators, modelers, and academics. Further, he supports Leadership, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Research, Development and Acquisition (DASN(RDA))/Test & Engineering, through participating and collaborating in multiple OUSD(A&S) and OUSD(R&E) MOSA Working Groups and Tiger Teams and is a key contributor to OUSD(R&E) Modular Open Systems Working Group (MOSWG).