Why does the industry use something like C? Even with the MISRA guidelines, it still seems like the wrong tool for the job when you have things out there like Erlang, which are designed for fault-tolerance and concurrency from the get go. I can imagine the requirement for hard real-time operation might be an issue (not sure enough about Erlang specifically to say if it does or doesn't address or hinder this, so I'll leave that to someone else).

What's that industry moving towards, software wise, to address this? Is Ada an alternative?

C (even MISRA) just seems like a horribly risky thing to use in this scenario.