Why not? These are maintenance heavy machines. Another line item in the maintenance procedure isn't necessarily a show-stopper.

We have a tendancy in software to think that the software should do literally everything even with a user actively working against it. A lot of times that is even more harmful.

Commercial and industrial software are very different things. Humans are an unreliable gate to safety and reliability, so if the gate to staying in the air is a human doing something that they can't see the results of it will inevitably fail.

And yet commercial airplanes, which have used this methodology for decades, are one of the most reliable mechanical systems humans have ever made. The mean-time-before-failure (MTBF) for component failures that impacted a 787 flight is ~40,000 hours [1] or about 4.5 flight-years per component failure, not full system failure, component failure. After nearly ~4,000,000 flight-hours there has not been a single full system failure or fatality yet in a 787 and this is only a fraction of the standard in aerospace so far. Between 2000 and 2010 there was ~1 death per 50 billion passenger-miles [2]. At an average speed of ~700 mph that would be 1 death per ~71 million passenger-hours or ~8150 passenger-years or ~125 airframe-years.

People who want to design reliable systems and processes look to airplanes for how to do that. That does not mean the same techniques are applicable or cost-effective in a different context, but at the very least the historical processes have been empirically demonstrated to produce extremely high reliability far beyond what nearly every other industry can attain and what many industries, such as commercial software, do not even attempt to achieve and may not even think is possible in their environment.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S100093612...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

> Commercial and industrial software are very different things.

Exactly my point. Trust no humans is not a philosophy that applies in aviation software.

It shouldn't apply quite as much in some other software either.

Flight software is fabulously expensive to maintain and update, because it is safety critical. Furthermore, avionics programmers have a surprisingly captive audience. You would be surprised to learn how many problems are left to operator-based workarounds.

It's actually fairly depressing and is part of the reason I transitioned to consumer software.

This! One way to mitigate safety critical issues is to pass it onto humans. This lowers how detailed you have to be when verifying the software, because you don't have to handle some critical aspects.