In article , Aviv Hod wrote:
They went $421 million OVER budget! What the heck is wrong here? Why are
ATC systems so expensive?

It's not just ATC systems - it's pretty much most large IT systems. ATC
is nothing special in an IT project that's late and over budget.

Writing software is _hard_ and inherently complex, and it's still done
more as an art form than an engineering discipline. There is a saying,
"If builders built buildings the way programmers write programs, the
first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization". It was true
20 years ago and it's still true today - for all the hardware advances,
there have been very few advances in software development.

--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"