Python for air traffic control?

[Russ]

I am thinking about using Python for a unique safety-critical
application in air traffic control. It will monitor a few hundred
aircraft for conformance to assigned trajectories, and it will
initiate an automatic alarm (for both controller and pilot) if an
aircraft deviates from its assigned trajectory and is in danger of a
collision. (The trajectory and tracking data will come from existing
C/C++ programs.) The software must be as simple, clean, and robust as
humanly possible. The default languages here are C/C++, but I am
toying with the idea of using Python instead. However, I am a bit
nervous about the lack of type checking and function prototyping,
among other issues. Is Python up to this task? Thanks for your
insights.