This is your captain....

I'm always wondering which operating system airplanes run on. I mean, those hundreds of indicators, gauges, displays etc. in a modern cockpit can't all be hard-wired. Well, I do hope it's not Windows, Linux, or any other desktop OS, since those platforms will never be reliable. I'm serious: never!

One would think that building a system that runs the inflight entertainment program is fairly simple, compared with the rest of rather complex airplane operation. Not quite: during a recent trip to Canada, I noticed that this Airbus 340 apparently had a few problems. Instead of showing movies, the screens repeatedly demonstrated a bootstrap loading routine.

Reminds me of the old joke: Back in the heydays of object-oriented programming, the running gag against Smalltalk programmers has been that real-time systems could never be developed in Smalltalk, because we'd otherwise hear "Good morning, folks, this is your captain. I'm afraid I can't land in Phoenix and we have to reroute to Albuquerque, because our landing gear program is currently busy doing garbage collection."