This position paper concerns itself with real-time safety critical distributed systems. It presents a computational model that is appropriate for this type of application and architecture. It then defines a resource allocations scheme based upon fixed priority scheduling. Such a scheme has the advantage (over purely static schedules) of supporting greater levels of flexibility and non-determinism, whilst still providing static guarantees of necessary timing behaviour (i.e. end-to-end deadlines through the systems). Priority based communication protocols are investigated, with possible future techniques reviewed.