Avionics Software: Where Are We?,

Since the digital computer first flew in an avionics system 25 years ago, the art has progressed from small very slow vacuum tube machines with limited memory to fast chip-based machines that not only do sensor processing but also integrate a variety of data sources into many capabilities--among others, navigation, sophisticated weapons delivery, programmed menu-displays to the air crew. As onboard computer hardware has proliferated, software inescapably has also. From a few hundreds of program words at the beginning, flight software is commonly many tens-of-thousands of words frequently, a few hundred thousands and in some cases, even a million. Thus, implementation and management of software resources has become a major problem area for military services. The paper explores dimensions of the issues as it now exists, suggests many positive actions under way, and proposes a direction in which the future may well move. It concludes that software will continue to be troublesome progress will come slowly. author