Originally Posted by bradthepilot

how many years do you have building complex software systems? Integrating that with hardware? Doing a security analysis including pen testing? Bluntly, i have way more experience in all those fields than you do, and i can promise you that making the computer "figure it out" is the easiest part of all that.

Proving that it isn't susceptible to black-hat actors is pretty darn hard. Proving it works in a virtually unlimited set of scenarios is harder still. And if there is any "artificial intelligence" involved, proving its functionality approaches the impossible.

In technology, it's often the validation ("testing") rather than the development that tends to drive costs for large scale projects, so this will be an extremely expensive undertaking. Has there been a cost vs. Benefit analysis done to show that such an undertaking is worthwhile?

These all come together to form a pretty complex system. Taking just a thin slice of functionality, you say that the aircraft could be controlled directly from the soc. How are they authenticated (i.e. How does the a/c know it isn't connected to an imposter soc)? How redundant is the soc? Where are they (you weren't thinking it was just a single location, were you?) located? How do they talk to each other? What is the failover protocol? How is a compromised soc detected and locked out? What is the data communications protocol and how much bandwidth will be required?

If you think this all happens quickly, i refer you to ads-b, which is a much simpler system that took decades to materialize. So no, the "head in the sand" folks as you call them, are correct. I have no doubt that such a system will eventually happen, but there is nothing to indicate that it will happen before any current pt. 121 pilot retires.