Originally Posted by PBL
obviously you have no experience with designing or building SW, let alone SW for what would be a safety-critical application
I have some ... Not on a big scale, I do admit.
But I have some deep knowledge of flight operations.
I confirm that reliable sofware is already available for terrain visualisation and terrain avoidance :
- Flight simulation software (all levels, PC driven and higher) is amazingly realistic (terrain visualisation and aircraft handling) => allowing approved "Zero flight time" aircraft type rating (no perceived difference between simulator and real aircraft handling).
- Military software allowing flight at low altitude inside valleys ... relying more and more on stored terrain data and less on radar.
And of course, reliable software already exists regarding aircraft handling, allowing auto land in zero-zero, and flight enveloppe protection ...
Please note that airbus flybywire software does not require supercomputers : an Intel 8186 does the job pretty well. 20 years old technology ... much cheaper and much more powerfull hardware is available today - about 1000 times more powerfull ....
Note also that more than 10 years ago, cheap (but certified) general aviation GPS receivers already included some kind of advisory terrain elevation data (grid mora).
And ... today, the most popular general aviation GPS manage to display a nice picture of the runway, and some landscape features as well, when approaching an airport to land.
Where is the lack of imagination? Well nobody did imagine that a modern airliner would meet a dual engine failure on short final, so nobody saw the need for a software to handle that - neither for a pilot training actually. That is lack of imagination.