>Commercial airlines make heavy use of it, and serious failures are vanishingly rare.

Is this a joke? There's a major outage effecting flights at least yearly. The Delta one is from May...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Southwest_Airlines_schedu... [2] https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/airline-news/2026/05/0...

The OP is talking about the software onboard airplanes, not the operational software used by airlines.

They should have said aircraft manufacturers, not airlines, but it’s clear what they meant.