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I think no industry producing anything new ever found a working process to predict and keep the timeline. (If omniscience really existed, it would have more lucrative applications.)

Developing new aircraft, building a new ship, building a custom-designed bridge (most of them are) are processes that often run out of time and / or budget.

If you want predictability, you want repeatability. But in software all reliably repeatable parts become automated away.

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Absolutely. And I'd add that predictability is dependent upon not learning anything over the course of the project. To be predictable either you know everything that matters up front (which is only true for trivial projects with no competitors) or you refuse to learn anything along the way (with, e.g., a big-bang release at the end).

But I think good projects release early and often precisely so that they can learn as they go. At which point predictability goes out the window.

? All the specified above endavours - usually run into what one could call the end of the map. Here be science! If you run into e.g. new material science because your goal stretched beyond the scope of what has been done previously, you can blame the engineer for not telling you that you will leave the boundary of the knowledge of a field- you can not blame him for the estimates beeing wrong.

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