Except there is a saying in aviation, "All the flight regulations and rules are written in blood."
Meaning that, over the past century, there was actually a ton of "testing in prod" in aviation. The industry learned many, many valuable lessons only after the billions and billions of hours of flight time exposed issues that weren't caught in preflight testing.
Your comment begins with "except", but the content agrees with the GP.
GP would like aviation users ("passengers") to not be the ones doing the testing. You state aviation users historically tested -- it's why flight regulations and rules are written in blood. I suspect the blood of passengers is exactly what the GP would like to avoid.
I can't tell if you didn't make the connection, or if your commenting style is just to naturally start negatively. My suspicion is the former, given the throwaway account.
Nope, that’s not the same thing at all. Those regulations are for required test coverage before things make it to prod. And they only happened in prod before the regulation because it was an unforeseen possibility.
You’re deluding yourself if you think the aviation industry just sells directly to customers new aircraft without testing them.
“Testing in prod” means, “I’m gonna try this thing and I’m not sure if it will work and my test environments don’t cover that so I’ll go straight to prod and see if it breaks.”
The software industry is the only place where that works because shipping to prod is literally faster than test suites in lots of cases and the stakes are so low on failure.
Unexpected catastrophic failures in prod != testing in prod.
It's quite clear the author of the article doesn't at all think that "testing in prod" means how you define it here. I'm not making any argument over what "testing in prod" should mean, but given how the author goes to great lengths explaining that he is not using it to mean "just throw stuff out in prod and let my users deal with it", I don't think it's fair to then say "Oh, keep this guy away from aviation because he tests in prod."
Meaning that, over the past century, there was actually a ton of "testing in prod" in aviation. The industry learned many, many valuable lessons only after the billions and billions of hours of flight time exposed issues that weren't caught in preflight testing.