Over the past 60 years, aerospace has achieved extraordinary technological progress. Yet one principle has remained constant: in safety-critical systems, reliability is everything. 

In the 1960s, Margaret Hamilton helped write the software that took humankind to the Moon, becoming a symbol of software engineering in mission-critical environments. 

Today, with the same focus on reliability, Athar, our collaborator, coordinated the environmental qualification of a safety-critical avionics unit, part of a helicopter navigation system. 

The unit underwent more than 46 categories of tests, including temperature, vibration, shock, EMC and altitude, many carried out in our in-house Qualification Lab in compliance with DO-160, MIL-STD and DEF-STAN. 

Together with the team, Athar contributed to 40 Qualification Test Reports, demonstrating the unit’s reliability. 

Credits: Margaret Hamilton: Draper Laboratory; restoration by Adam Cuerden / Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.