@Ian W,
Yes I'm aware that the established traditional practioners in the field of flight controls are working very hard indeed to do things the right way, to their immense credit. And they do it the traditional way; carefully evolving a testable specification, applying analytical forethought and rigour along the way, and then testing it.
That is how it should be.
It is indeed the newer breed of transport entrepreneur who I worry about the most. They seem to see rules as barriers to be pushed over, rather than enablers of a far larger market.
Unfortunately I can't guarantee that politicians won't be persuaded to make rash decisions. So far in the self driving car endeavour politicians have behaved quite sensibly (California publishes the statistics resulting from trials, much to Google's annoyance...).
Uber's approach to developing self-driving technology is a wonder to behold; it seemingly involves zero forethought and specification writing, being nothing more than throwing a lot of data into a machine learning algorithm and accepting whatever emerges as "finished" so long as it seems to behave itself!
I can add another example:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/0...ones_uas_rpas/. Mike Gadd of the CAA did a good job of pouring a large quantity of cold water on their parade by reminding them that their software would have to be considered "safety critical", and therefore certified as such. It rather took the shine of their glitzy animations and exciting talks...