gman83 parent
As software developers, we should perhaps refrain from criticizing aeronautical engineers' QA standards.
"push to prod, let the users debug for us" would at least, I'd hope, offer lower ticket prices for said users.
Early in my career, I worked for a subcontractor to Boeing Commericial Airplanes. I've worked in Silicon Valley ever since. As a swag, the % of budget spent on verification/validation for flight-critical software was 5x versus my later jobs.
Early in the job, we watched a video about some plane that navigated into a mountain in New Zealand. That got my attention.
On the other hand, the software development practices were slow to modernize in many cases e.g. FORTRAN 66 (but eventually with a preprocessor).
Likely air New Zealand flight 901 which crashed into mount Erebus in Antarctica (not in New Zealand proper) in 1979. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Erebus_disaster
Yes, thanks for the identification.