I've never worked in aerospace, however I'm interested in safety-critical software engineering, and I've written a lot of Ada (and written about my experiences with it too). My understanding is that yes you can write safety-critical code in just about any language, but it's much easier to prove conformance to safety standards (like DO-178C, etc.) in Ada than in C++.

I regularly do hobby bare-metal programming in both Ada and C. I find that Ada helps prevent a lot of the common footguns in C. It's not a silver bullet for software safety, but it definitely helps. The point of any programming language is to make doing the right thing easy, and doing the wrong thing hard. All things considered, I think Ada does a good job of that.