On Jan 29, 8:21*pm, wrote:
As I said elsewhere, computers and software are tools for the Pilot
and should be used accordingly. *Either by themselves may have flaws
that in combination could be eliminated.-

Fair to say.

The space shuttle can't be landed without software. There are modern
bombers/fighters that are apparently too difficult to control without
software making minor corrections to flight inputs (I've read. I
haven't flow, so I don't know but from heresay and magazine articles).

My prejudice is working 10 years in software and seeing for myself how
small flaws can be missed by even extraordinary testing regimes and
not detected by even the best of developers.

For experimental aircraft and small GA aircraft in particular I prefer
cables and pulleys and turnbuckles to software activated electric
motors.

I wouldn't have thought that an offhand crude comment about open
source software could have so thoroughly hijacked this thread.

I have over 43 years of developing software and would consider myself
among the best in my field but even I have been known to miss the
occasional bug. BFG Software development and testing have come a
long long way in the last 40 years but as long as man is doing the
development, there will be things that we never anticipated.

The beauty of open source, be it software or aviation is the
combination of knowledge and forsight from multiple inputs. Those
billion dollar military fighters that require software to make them
controlable required the input of many developers and testers along
with years of refinement. Even then, there will eventually come a
combination of events that everybody thought to be impossible and the
software will fail. Hopefully, there will be someone at the controls
who despite the imperfections of man will find a way to overcome the
problem.