Researchers and academics did pretty well on weather models, which are much more important to safety than aviation software, because you can’t just disable severe weather for a few days.
Flight codes -- and making sure they don't break systems -- is a software engineering problem.
Different skillsets. I know folks who work at national labs. They have neither the skillset nor the interest to do this kind of work. (I am a researcher)
Strongly agreed. What makes this hard is not something novel algorithmically or in squeezing the last little bit of performance out.
It's the monumental effort of coordination across many, many entities running legacy software and doing so in a way that doesn't take down critical infrastructure in the process.
It's very, very difficult but in a completely different way to building weather modeling systems.
