Have you ever tried to review lines of code to look for mistakes?
I dabbled breifly in programming a few years ago, and it was tough to find mistakes in a couple hundred lines of code.
Now, think of the millions of lines of code it’d take for operating one of those jets. Even if we did review it, something might be missed. The enemies of the United States are sneaky, and despite what we’d like to think, we aren’t invincible...and we can be fooled.
(I personally hated typing that, but that is the truth.)
We also have no control over who works on these planes. I don’t trust Europe -completely politically correct- to make sure no bad guy gain access to the code and/ or to the planes. If it’s not made here by an American company, we have no control over these matters.
Things have progressed some now. We routinely run simulators of automated equipment with a snooper that looks for unused lines of code. We run the unit through all of the parameters and errors and then look for stuff that was never used. Cuts way down on the search.
Hey that’s a great point it’s a fly wire plane!