Hopefully I am not too naive, but I think aircraft safety redundancy remains above retail car standards. Also, in aircraft they "have time to solve some problems", versus freeway bumper cars.
More to the point, FAS regulations would absolutely forbid any such event. They probably mandate testing of the updates before returning to airplane to service.
In service to the pun, there is a relatively famous demo of using erlang for embedded development where they show off hot code reloading of a drone's flight software while it's in flight.
Also people say "oh what if fly-by-wire fails" well what if traditional hydraulic controls fail, which has happened plenty in the history of commercial aviation
Everything can and will fail at some point
No redundancy is redundancy enough in some %0.xx of cases. You can always reduce the number, but never make it 0
I work for a medical device manufacturer, and software absolutely can be designed to be just as reliable as physical systems, but the development and testing process looks completely different than a developing a mobile app. Things slow WAY down: if you want to change one line of code, it'll take literally weeks before it makes it to a production environment because of all the testing, documentation, justification, and human approvals. I imagine flight safety systems are subject to a similar level of rigor.
"Richard Hipp: Getting that last 5% is really, really hard and it took about a year for me to get there, but once we got to that point, we stopped getting bug reports from Android.
"Richard Hipp: Yes, so we’ll do billions of tests."
