The paper describes and critiques the certification of U.S. aviation software. Flight-critical software certification and regulation need external academic review and intervention. Industry is driven to generate profits over prioritizing public safety concerns and has failed to develop adequately proven methods of certifying that flight-critical software is safe to deploy.

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.