Safety concerns regarding the use of visual programming in civilian avionics software

Abstract

The paper examines the regulatory oversight of flight critical avionic software using Visual Programming Languages (VPLs) as a specific example and points out shortcomings with the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA's) process of verifying software. VPLs and environments are being applied in conjunction with Automatic Generated Code (AGC) to create software for safety critical avionics systems which will control the fate of commercial vehicles and their passengers. There are no empirical, statistically significant studies which demonstrate that using VPLs to generate source code has any real advantage over text based programming languages. The paper describes the need for empirical software development studies.