Swissair Flight 111, the MD-11 jumbo jet that crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia on Sept. 2, put a scare into me. Every frequent flier wrestles with the notion that one day his number may come up. (Engineers have a peculiarly specific vision of a disaster scenario, usually involving a flight attendant running through the cabin yelling, "Does anybody here know how to fly this thing?" Sure, just pull back on the yoke. How hard can it be?)

Surprisingly, when air disasters are ultimately dissected, the root causes are often found to be so obscure that it's difficult to come up with any firm prescriptions for prevention. Such post-accident analyses were brilliantly laid out in last year's "Terror in the Sky," a documentary series on cable television's The Learning Channel.

A DC-10 that crash-landed in an Iowa cornfield was brought down by a microscopic crack in a titanium compressor blade. A 747 lost to explosive decompression was crippled by a bulkhead repair short on rivets.

I have to confess that I'm fascinated by troubled flights because they hammer home the true meaning of engineering. We aren't talking desktop PCs here. Airframes, engines and avionics are the real deal. Human lives are at stake, so bugs and flaccid design techniques must be eschewed at all costs.

Which brings us to Ada, the Rodney Dangerfield of computer-programming languages. Originally pressed into service in the late 1970s by the U.S. Department of Defense, Ada gets no respect because it's seen as a remnant of bloated military engineering practices.

In reality, Ada aids reliability by enforcing compile-time consistency checks. As Ada advocate Tucker Taft, chief scientist at Intermetrics Inc., explains it, "Ada provides a rich set of range checks and overflow checks, which help catch more bugs earlier in the life cycle, where they are easier and less costly to fix and certainly less threatening.

"The effect is that Ada projects reach the desired quality level faster than those written in [other] languages," Taft added.

Those are some of the reasons Ada is making a name for itself in safety-critical, real-time development. It's why Boeing used Ada for the avionics in its new, "fly-by-wire" 777.

As we move into an era that will be increasingly dominated by such electronically controlled aircraft, we should all think about applying Ada.

Small comfort though it may be, everyone who ever steps onto an airplane should have the confidence that if they're brought down, it's not going to be by the software.