I worked on modernization in the FAA specifically around digitizing NOTAMs.
I would urge you not to consider this modernization from the perspective you may be familiar, as someone who may work on the bleeding edge and sometimes sees a lack of caution from engineers pushing for change.
The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.
One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.
I get the idea that the current administration is pushing safety to the side, but there is another risk where safety becomes a blocker to reasonable change.
When I left that work (more than 15 years ago) it was clearly a blocker.
This isn't like COBOL. Floppy disc were never reliable. They should've been phased out a long time ago
Magnetic degradation, wear from read/write heads, and environmental sensitivity mean disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long. And they are also easy to corrupt from all kinds of magnetic sources around us.
I get other stuff, even DOS like system. Safety critical software/hardware that was battle tested makes sense. Not floppy. Sometime it's just bureaucracy.
My experience has been both. I remember, years ago, occasionally having the problem of going through many to find one with no bad sectors. But, a few years back, I dumped all my old floppies, and very few of them had issues.
I wonder if quality control was bad. It seems like the disks that were good 30 years ago are still good.
My Commodore Amiga 500 floppies from the late 1980ies still work. I went nostalgic a couple months ago, booted about eight of those floppies and all worked.
They were probably kept dry the hole time, but I did move several times, they were in boxes in cellars and in garages.
They absolutely mog the cancerous garbage that is NAND flash memory in terms of data retention. The fact that you can pick an 1980s floppy from the junk room and read it is telling. Meanwhile your average TLC SSD will probably get wiped in 3 years if kept in the drawer, and a QLC will get wiped in 1 year.
Reliability wise floppies are also better: flash memory leaks electrons naturally and gets shredded by radiation events, with temperaure accelerating these processes. Meanwhile magnetic disks are not altered by any normal magnetic field you could produce at home.
Survivorship bias. Floppies failed all the time. Flash can be unreliable if you’re talking about the cheapest or abused the wrong way, but flash SSDs handled wisely are much better than hdds , which in turn are much better than floppies.
If you compare the thumb stick that came free from a convention then compare it to a floppy that came free with a magazine. And in the end neither matters because they’re both cheapest possible junk, not fair examples of the tech.
Similarly, the cheapest led bulbs (put in poorly ventilated fittings) have crappy lifetimes, but that’s not the techs fault, it’s because they weren’t engineered to last, they are cheap crap. Well designed leds placed sensibly are vastly better than bulbs, but that’s hidden by the cheap end of the market
This is just flatly false. You're comparing a worst case SSD with maybe 10% of its writes left to an extremely lucky floppy disk that hasn't died to binder hydrolysis, mold and fungal growth, warping or demagnetization. And you also completely made up that you couldn't generate a strong enough magnetic field at home to corrupt one - you absolutely could especially since rare earth magnets are not that uncommon and are more than enough to kill a floppy.
Say, the Siemens PLCs I earn my living programming uses SD cards which range from 64kB to, uh, 128MB, methinks.
They still work after decades, so clearly, you can get long term reliable flash storage; just don't expect to be able to store your 4k holiday videos on them.
I used to do floppy disk data recovery as a service for students at college. Roughly speaking, we helped one student out every three hours, out of 2,500 students, during busy hours. Based on the rates and hours, I think it would come out to something like 25% of the student body, each year, coming to us with a data loss incident involving floppy disks.
YMMV. I’m sure a lot of people were shoving these things into backpacks, and this was post-2000, so the quality of disks for sale was poorer than it was in the 90s and 80s.
I’ve also (since then, for myself) repaired drives. The drives fail because they’re mechanical and have motors, and anything that moves or has a motor in it will need some kind of service. Servicing a floppy drive requires specialized equipment which is hard to find (or requires a lot of patience—it’s possible to repair a floppy drive with just a screwdriver, but it’s not fun; guess how I know?)
HD floppies were much worse, both 1.44MB and 1.2MB. They are just much more susceptible to defects from wear and tear because of the shrunken sector size. DD 3.5" wasn't as bad.
3.5" floppies were still common while I was in college. I have distinct memories of copying a project to a floppy in my dorm room, popping the disk out, walking next door (literally next door in the dorms, not even going outside up or down stairs or anything), popping the disk into a team member's PC and the project being gone. We laughed it off and chucked the disk in the trash and got another. Project wasn't lost-lost since I had a copy on my hard disk. This was also the era of the 100MB Zip Drives, which I also had in my PC and thankfully all of our lab PCs had, too. That's what I normally used for all of my day-to-day file transfers of any real import. I still have my zip disks, but I seem to have lost my zip drive, so no idea if the disks still have any data on them.
I was on a school paper in high school and was taking photos on a "digital" camera that wrote to 3.5" floppies. Some of them are still with the (printed) copies of my articles I kept. I'll have to see if they survived.
This is probably my "I'm getting old" moment. Good lord.
Yeah at the time. You would get the whole range of good/bad disks. Sometimes even between computers. May work just fine on one computer and not the next. It was not common but it wasnt totally rare either. Just sometimes would catch out out at silly times.
That they are still used in a critical infra item is a bit surprising. Getting new stock would be a major hassle.
Wow, it's crazy how experiences differ! I've never encountered anything more unreliable than zip disks. Even burned CDs lost to the dreaded buffer couldn't compete with the failure rate of those things. Past me wishes I had your luck with them, they were super cool.
Depends on the schools for networks. I attended a college that finished adding wired networks to their dorms in 2000 or so. It just wasn't a campus priority in the 90s, fewer students had computers back then. If it was a school with more money or an engineering school they got to it earlier, the rest added it when they added it.
Also depends on the environment. My dad used to repair the pre-PC computers: Amiga, Commodore, Atari, Spectrum, etc. I've had access to them before many others have even seen a computer. I've been given a really heavy, not-completely-broken and usable laptop before they became affordable for normal people.
People who grew up with or lived in the tech environment had access to lots of things.
Until quite recently, my Dad had a Zip drive plugged into an ancient Pentium box (back when "Pentium" meant "successor to 486"). I don't know when it was last actually used, but it's LED had been on since the 90s.
Sure, but what are the odds they're using these rather than HD 3.5" disks purchased from whatever new old stock they've been able to source over the past 20-odd years?
> disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long
You really have no idea what you are talking about. It's normal for floppies, especially 3.5" to last decades just sitting on a shelf. I've got 5.25" floppies from 1984, and they boot just fine on my old apple //e.
Of course some will last longer. It's not a cliff, just "not recommended to use for longer than...". But a lot depends on the conditions of storage, how much usage they got, etc. Manufacturers gave them 10-20 years normally, which puts almost all of them in the not recommended territory.
The fact people have old working floppies doesn't change the fact that degradation happens.
That's how it was named. The bootscreen didn't say Apple IIe. It's Apple //e. with slashes. That's how it was in all the docs and any software and the bootrom.
Call it weird if you want, but that's what the name was.
I mean, like you want to name your dog Bell character, right-to-left character, Bell character, 0-width space. Can you do that legally? Can you do that culturally? Would that become the dog's name in most of the senses?
Random characters in Apple product names is similar territory, although less extreme.
Absent doing something wildly abusive, vinyl records will play fine for a long time. And the degradation is comparatively graceful.
Source: go to any used record shop and find a copy of Chicago >5[0]. It'll almost certainly play, even if the music wasn't particularly good to start with.
[0] There are many copies of later Chicago albums in used record stores.
And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive and it’s not because usb drives are reliable.
Without having details on the specific floppy disks in question there’s no way you can authoritatively say they are unreliable. They absolutely produced floppy disks that were far more reliable than the ones sourced from the cheapest vendor possible some of us used in school back in the day. Ignoring the fact I’m guessing the disks in question aren’t having to survive life in a students backpack.
Ohhh, don't compare magnetic backup tapes to floppy. Same designs underneath but completely different storage shell, delivery mechanism, even the coating is different.
One cost $100 another $1.
Then these tapes are typically write once read many.
They were designed to deal with floppy disk flaws consumers deal with.
Actually really cool to read about modern tape systems.
I had a customer with a slightly dusty office and we simply gave up on tape drives as a backup storage medium because we were replacing the drives or tapes on a monthly basis.
We switched them over to external USB enclosures with cheap SATA drives in them and never looked back.
It's because magnetic storage where the drive bearings are separated from the media can be expected to sit on properly temperature controlled shelf for 50 years with next to no bit rot, in contrast to flash.
>The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.
If this is the case, why was an airport knocked offline due to a cut fiber optic? A safety focused system would have a backup system say satellite or mobile 4G/5G. But they didn't have such.
This isn't about safety. Its about bureaucracy wrapped up as safety.
There was a third system, the fallback they used to prevent loss of life, legacy systems and a system shutdown.
You can argue thats not a sufficient third redundancy, I don't have enough context to throw an opinion out there on the safety of this particular infrastructure project.
I am confident that the fallback process was considered and kept in place as the tertiary backup.
Excellent point though. It took me some thinking to put myself back in SRM mindset and what they'd have considered here.
> Which is why many systems on most airliners are redundant in threes
Not really. Triplex redundancy is based on a failure model where failures can produce arbitrary output. Three systems allows majority voting (often, median select) to provide correct output in the presence of a single arbitrary failure. It allows detection of double-fail-silent failures and uncorrelated double failures, but that's not really the point, since continued operation under these conditions is at risk, and failing nonoperational isn't often acceptable for these systems. (You'll also see quadruplex systems that use the same voting mechanism to detect and disable failed channels, allowing handling two arbitrary non-simultaneous failures, for systems that need a longer window of continued operation after failure.)
If you change the failure modes, you change the architecture. These days you often see dual-dual systems where each pair of systems cross-checks and disables itself on mismatch, converting a single arbitrary failure to a single silent failure; which then allows downstream systems to accept inputs from two such fail-silent systems and trust either that is providing output, removing the need for a median select.
Very interesting, I’d love to learn more. Is there anything you’d recommend in terms of a general introduction to different kinds of fault tolerance? Literature, video material, could be whatever.
Unfortunately this has been on-the-job learning for me over the last few decades so I don't have great sources to point you to, but this is covered in systems engineering courses for aerospace and automotive applications.
Same thing with control-theory - there’s so much established knowledge out there that one really needs to know but which isn’t taught to kids in uni or even postgrad level. Learning these things on-the-job means you don’t know what you don’t know…
What’s a better way? We still don’t have state-regulation/certification for software in safety critical systems, which terrifies me when I think about it.
We have DO-178C for aviation, which (a) is a pretty good standard and (b) is a heck of a lot better than ISO26262. It's "voluntary", but it's the only game in town, so…
The 747 had 4 independent hydraulic systems (one for each engine). There were still failures that took out all 4. What comes to mind is the one where the rear pressure bulkhead failed (due to a faulty repair), and the decompression took out the rudder and all 4 hydraulics.
The pilot no longer had flight controls. He desperately tried to control the airplane using variable thrust, but it just wasn't good enough, and crashed into a mountainside.
The fix was to add automatic valves in the lines so loss of pressure wouldn't bleed out the whole system.
>If this is the case, why was an airport knocked offline due to a cut fiber optic? A safety focused system would have a backup system say satellite or mobile 4G/5G. But they didn't have such.
There is a strong difference between an airport going down and ATC causing and accident.
Uptime isn't safety, they have very orthogonal characteristics.
Ridiculous false dichotomy. The bureaucracy can get in the way sometimes, but ultimately it is about safety, and the FAA has done an amazing job over the past several decades regulating the skies and played a massive role in making aviation as safe as it is. Standards are rigid and very well defined and change slowly because aviation is an industry where mistakes create massive disasters. There is some collateral inefficiency from things moving slow but thats way preferable to the collateral damage that would be caused by "move fast break things".
Although you were generally right, you can't say that after the parties between Boeing and FAA agents, nor FAA using Boeing consultants to inspect Boeing, fail inspections, still pass them, crash 4 planes and be humiliated by having Boeing Max flight permissions only revoked by the European authority. And the Macdonnell history with FAA says it is not new.
Macdonnell was bought by Boeing, and the legend says it's precisely this _expertise_ that Boeing bought. The Boeing self-burning batteries and wrongly-handcrafted airframes of 2013 are signature of Macdonnell's way of managing issues.
The problem is that in the FAA's domain, there are legitimately situations where bureaucracy is indispensable. For example, they just issued an AD to require inspections of a few specific bolts on early production 787s because Boeing thinks they MAY have bolted the wings on with incorrectly sized shims, which over a decade MAY contribute to accelerated fatigue on these parts. Not a single plane has crashed but this kind of thing has caused other planes to crash in the past.
These airplanes are flying all over the world, the inspections need ultrasonic data, and the FAA has to validate that all of them are done. Even identifying this issue required lots of bureaucracy.
Multiply that by the number of airplanes and airplane models and it's easy to see why they move so slowly: when you are putting millions of people in the air each day, enforcing absurdly specific rules with an iron fist requires a monster of a bureaucracy.
But moving faster and without accountability is generally worse.
In a perfect world, we would move at a steady pace, as to keep up with the world but without rushing, and people would be accountable without a heavy bureaucratic processes.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works in practice, at least not for long, so between the two, we usually favor the slow and bureaucratic process when safety and reliability matter.
In fact, it's created a bunch of risks. Like the fact that nobody manufacturers floppy disks or floppy disk readers anymore.
I can understand not changing a system for change sake, but the floppy disk has been obsolete for nearly 20 years now. It's been hard to find a floppy disk reader for the last 10 years. Going so slow that you can't respond to that change is far FAR too slow.
I worked for a salesforce partner and we spent the two years I was there working with a large ag equipment manufacturer. They had two legacy systems that were still (as I was told) some combination of Fortran and early Unix systems. They had been reluctant to upgrade them because one of the their main manufacturing machines was still running on it and they were terrified if they upgraded and something went wrong, it would cost them millions in production time.
As you pointed out, you can't find floppy discs or disc manufacturers any more. I do remember one of the VP's of this company saying as long as they keep teaching Fortran to college engineers, they have no reason to upgrade yet. That got a few raised eyebrows from our team. We relented and upgraded what they were comfortable with - but man oh man it was quite the eye opener for me as a young dev how the thought processes of the people running these companies really are.
As long as those manufacturing systems were air-gapped and working, I can understand being conservative with changes. Of course at some point you're at risk of hardware failures too, for things that are likely NLA.
> Of course at some point you're at risk of hardware failures too, for things that are likely NLA.
Yeah, that's really the biggest issue with these systems. Were I one of these manufacturers I'd invest in getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware. The last thing they'll want to deal with is that their software was written for Sun Spark and that no longer exists.
That said, hard to go wrong porting over the x86 at this point.
> ...getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware.
Some of the signal control infrastructure for the Melbourne rail network was ported over to an emulated PDP-11 System for this reason. This was previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514553
My understanding, from a long retired uncle (after a 40 year career at the National Institues of Health writing nothing but Fortran), is that Claude writes perfectly idiomatic, performant Fortran. Which I suppose is not a surprise given how it was trained, but I still found amusing to hear.
Have the idioms of Fortran changed much over the decades? Because idiomatic C++ today is unrecognizable to how people had to write for VC++ Win32 until well-until the 2010s.
Yes, infamously so. It was fixed-width at one point.
My humbling Claude experience was pointing at a codebase it took me weeks to get to a good 2003 standard, and watch it do the next fifteen years, cleanup, refactoring, feature additions that needed the tech debt solved I never got round to first, in minutes.
Yeah, that's what I'd have expected especially because I believe the USB mass media standard was part of the original standard. You'd need no special drivers to work with a modern USB thumb drive even if you are dealing with windows 98 (Win95 had usb support, but I believe you still had to install the drivers for it).
Not only drivers. The initial release of Windows 95 predates USB itself, so the entire USB stack didn't appear until later OEM service releases that AFAIK were never released as updates for existing installs or even as retail products (unless you count MSDN or OEM System Builder products with their associated license restrictions).
Yup, it can create a situation where you have a huge incentive towards workarounds and hacky fixes because doing it properly incurs huge costs. This is especially bad when a fundamentally quite bad design makes it through certification (most processes don't really prevent this).
Presumably such a confident assertion is based on sufficient actual experience with slower safety protocols such that you can state, positively, that faster-moving processes produce safer, human-life critical, systems... ?
You really, really need to work in industrials controls before your opinion carries weight on this - there are plenty of 40 year old systems humming along keeping the world turning that are bulletproof reliable.
'Move fast and break things' is fine when the result of failure is someone failing to make a billion dollars at their IPO. It's not acceptable in the world where failure means dams break, reactors go supercritical, planes collide, or other similarly apocalyptic scenarios.
Yes - but those examples don't all have the same risk modalities. With dams and reactors, most failure variables can be permanently contained by initial system design/engineering and construction quality, continually inspected surroundings and internals, and physics certainty. Human inputs are limited and daily inspection matters, but any momentary error or lapse of operator attention won't result in instant destruction. You have hours and days with Dams, minutes and hours with reactors. In aviation it only takes a split second.
Aviation involves constant unpredictable human inputs and physical states. Hundreds of vehicles, not installations designed to have as few moving parts as possible. It is not yet solved, the status quo merely has a societally tolerable death rate. There can be new sensor hardware, more safety redundancies, and info synthesis/notification interfaces that are currently blocked by old hardware bottlenecks. Controller and pilot time and attention is limited, and it can be wasted less.
> Controller and pilot time and attention is limited, and it can be wasted less.
And inversely... when pilots leave too much to automation, their skills may degrade to the point that by the time you actually need a capable human crew because something has gone terribly wrong, the capability of that crew has degraded too much, and the FAA has warned about this in the past [1].
The fiber cut was to the Philadelphia TRACON facility, which is run by the FAA. Also, the FAA runs the towers at airports, unless it's a contract facility. No idea how the infra is handled at contract facilities, but I'd be shocked if it didn't follow FAA guidelines, such that the FAA is dictating the levels of redundancy available.
Also, there's a big difference between a small towered airport in a more rural area, and a major international airport with 10x or more the commercial traffic. So there's probably some difference of buildout depending on the facility usage.
Quick edit: looks like there were two fiber cut incidents recently, one at an airport last month, and the TRACON issue that happened 1.5 months ago!
You may recall we went on an orgy of firing federal workers and cutting “waste fraud and abuse”. That impacted engineering, operations and boring jobs like finance and contracts. After the helicopter / airliner collision in DC they accelerated a bunch of stuff to show fire and motion.
Backhoes can disrupt connections, but so can failures to pay bills.
Systems like the radar in question often cannot work with broadband and satellite links.
Engineering will not save you from incompetent governance.
The presence of bureaucracy doesn't mean safety isn't the main consideration, it also isn't a given that bureaucracy is a negative in this instance. The safety record speaks for itself: you are safer in a commercial airplane than just about anywhere else you can go.
The adage is that “you can’t test quality into a product.” The FAA stands as a final test that you attempted to rigorously engineer for safety, but that is no substitute for a company culture that prioritizes safety. It’s like when you release a bug to production and you turn around and blame QA. Yes they missed it but so did you.
> The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.
In one role, I worked on writing software for drones.
That very rigorous process was very reassurring to me. Reasonable progress was absolutely occurring.
> One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.
What kind of risks were you looking at with what kinds of balances, if you're able to share?
Thanks for clarifying! I also really liked the SRM process.
Insomuch as people protecting their jobs: that's always a thing. But I honestly felt that people wanted to protect their jobs because they wanted to protect the public. Some people definitely wanted to keep their work and personal life separate with solid 9-to-5 boundaries. That's perfectly OK too. It was helpful to be inclusive of them even if their time was already filled.
I worked with numerous people who didn't understand all of the components or systems. We took it upon ourselves to be very open to questions and to thoroughly explain how each thing works. I've found if someone had good understanding of one component but didn't understand another component, it was very useful to schedule time with them to walk through the components they didn't understand to try to alleviate their concerns. They might not know what questions to ask, so I would instead ask questions about their well-known components to try to understand and correlate to newer components. Perhaps their concerns were even justified but they didn't know how to articulate them!
Rules and regulations in aviation are written in blood. Moving fast is not a virtue when the industry is already as safe as it is. Even if the change is to something objectively better with no drawbacks, the act of change itself creates risk for accidents.
Basically when accident rates are already very low, even a small amount of transitional risk can add up to offset years of marginal improvements. So the burden of proof rests heavily on the proposer of change to a system that already is working reliably.
Agreed. If the floppy system fulfills it's purpose safely, why switch for the sake of it? New stuff can be better, when it's better integrated or even if it's just easier to use (less errors) but old tech in and of itself isn't bad.
Within this is a further heartening reassurance that I chose a profession I will be able to do until my dying day. But at 55 I see my safest option is my own business where some higher up doesn't take me off a role I improve to give it to someone they know.
> One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.
Can you recall anything that that engineer said or did which turned out to be credible? Or which you perhaps learned from?
This is great. Question was, did you folks consider simply replacing these with Goteks and / or testing something just a bit more reliable while digitizing these NOTAMs?
The SV (silicon valley) motto of fail fast and break things accelerated evolution of software design systems. Can you imagine what would happen if people were hesitant to use Git works because a merge could break something? Lol.
But this kind of precaution is quite necessary in the development of AI systems. Current regulations have turned a blind eye to accelerate software and AI progress. Now we have security bugs and misalignments, and we will have AI misalignments as well.
Knowing how computing landscape has changed in SV, I can't imagine modern day SV helping fix FAA systems. Alternatively we could go with multiple incarnations of the same system, being battle tested and proven with independent concurrences, alongside current FAA system. Yeah, it is a boatload of money, and probably wasting 90 percent of it in redundancy.
> Can you imagine what would happen if people were hesitant to use Git works because a merge could break something? Lol.
Version control was always something that was adopted more by process-heavy organizations until the popularization of GitHub. Before that, it was common for the move-fast type of developers to eschew version control.
Earlier in my career, people didn't bother with the chore of using version control unless they were working on an important project that demanded it.
Even though it wasn't part of the curriculum, I learned to use Git (and Mercurial) before I finished school. I found it pretty useful then even for school projects that were, by their nature, solo projects that would never see the light of day. I didn't find Git super burdensome.
Idk, I feel like the difficulty of Git (which is real in some respects) has long been exaggerated by people who are categorically unwilling to RTFM.
One place I applied to 'hmm think we toss it onto sourcesafe once and awhile'. It was their main product. They had about 15 people working on it. Plus one big ol folder on that one machine that was 'the builds'.
Some slight rigor shows you are not just doing whatever. I found most projects once you scale past 2 or 3 people and your 3rd release you basically are forced into some sort source control. Or it is a game of 'what file did they break today and I have to spend 3 hours fixing before I can add my feature'. Then you end up with merge meetings and very weird things happening.
Usually missing source control in an older org means there is a large swath of tech debt. Watch for the weeds. You will find other things very quickly.
I never understood this thinking of "I don't need a source repo". As soon as I learned about RCS, I started to used it for all of my code. Why? So I can easily diff my changes and review history.
AI does not know friend from foe. Iranian schoolgirls were killed by assumably an AI-directed decision. In games, there is an undo button. For those piloting killer drones having grown up in a nintendo world, one of the first things they are taught is there is no undo.
It's not like targeting mistakes have not been made in the past. Also, we don't know how many civilian casualties AI has avoided, we only know the ones it caused.
We are not comparing AI to humans. We are referring to irresponsible programming and uses. AI is an irreproducible wildcard. You don’t use something like that in any mission critical environment.
Computers have skyrocketed in price, data center related equipment is impossible to get and ludicrously expensive and AI slop has infested almost everything I see online.
Famously it already broke out of containment many times and used exploits to illegally access and manipulate remote systems. Is this not enough for you? The fact that the target of the attack wasn't critical infrastructure is only a matter of circumstance.
> I get the idea that the current administration is pushing safety to the side
Can you provide any examples you've come across where the current administration has pushed safety to the side with respect to the FAA? I'm curious to read about those. I know there have been some changes to regulations and there are sometimes disagreements around those but I'm not sure if the ones I've seen (which aren't comprehensive) would be considered pushing safety to the side.
It's not a serious statement. It's just something that people feel the need to add to their posts on certain message boards, including HN. The biggest tell is they never EVER mention President Trump by name or even the less specific "Trump administration". It is always "the current administration". You'll see it here dozens of times a week, that exact same phrase from a multitude of posters using it in the same way. You'll never get a good faith answer to your question because the statement itself was made for performative reasons and not for fostering serious discussion. Now that you know, you'll be surprised how much that exact phrase "the current administration" is used in this manner, not just here, but on public message boards across the internet.
I did! I mean it was there when you replied, but it's there. Maybe you missed it, but wanted to make sure you knew someone did so you don't have to have that false belief anymore.
in your opinion, what would be the most intellectually honest comparison? aviation in Europe or China? it would seem that a lot of shortages / pressures are artificial, in the sense that they are created purposefully by a political process.
we can look at this more holistically than a specific IT project. like in china, which is not a place i want to live, it is still valid to say, their process of steamrolling past local interests means that airport expansion and transit to new airports can be built quickly, which helps meet demand for air travel better than working at the absolute limits of safety and efficiency tradeoffs.
local control in the US infests everything. it causes airports to be too small, guilds to grow too slowly, it opposes infrastructure, it makes politicians too vulnerable and too weak to make changes that upset minor but powerful real estate interests.
so in one POV, safety is a blocker to reasonable change, but everywhere else in the world, they just increase capacity, and the huge stresses on safety limits are reduced.
> $12.5 billion to fix the aging US air traffic control system and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants another $30 billion for additional upgrades as the FAA deals with numerous technology issues.
Why does it cost this much? wouldn't any modern consumer grade computer be able to handle these tasks?
Using numbers I think sound big and ridiculous, I don’t see how you spend more than $1m/per airport x ~500 commercial airports for compute and work stations, maybe another, $2m per airport for cable runs, radars and radios, and the like, and maybe ~$1b on software development (it’s the government) that’s $2.5b rounded up $3b I can’t fathom $42.5b
More information needed. Was this a sneakernet? No one thought of replacing with a floppy emulator and SD cards? All of the data can fit into 1.44MB?
If the last one is true, devs take note. If FAA can rely on slow, small storage for safety critical applications, you probably can reduce the resource requirements for your app and improve your customers’ experience and extend the life of their hardware.
There’s been an incredible expansion of computer hardware and networking in every dimension since the heyday of the floppy. And the floppy itself was a huge step up from technology of even a few years prior.
Your comment could have been made in any year since 1950, and it would have been both correct and irrelevant outside the areas most resistant to hardware upgrades. FAA is conservative, and should be, but the rest of us have supercomputers in our pockets.
Have software developers abused the hardware capabilities they have been granted? Of course they have. I’d love to see some care put into that. But beyond the basics, hand-twiddled hyperoptimizations are now an exercise for craftspeople. Or…AI?
> but the rest of us have supercomputers in our pockets.
The issue is they don't feel like supercomputers, because of how much they've been taken for granted.
My computer and phone today feel no faster or better to use than they did 20 years ago. They might be vastly more capable for niche applications, but for the day-to-day stuff it seems like we keep buying new hardware, so we can run the latest software at the same old speeds, mostly for security updates.
I have an M1 MBP... a bit old, but still does everything I need. When I click Calendar in the dock (when it is already open, but just haven't used it in a while), it can take 3-5 seconds to come to the front as the active app. It feels broken. This wait wasn't a thing 5 years ago on this hardware, nor was it an issue on a PPC Mac from 25 years ago. Yet now its' a problem... why? So the UI can calculate the refraction of the background image in the liquid glass? Should I be spending $2,500 on a new MBP just to switch more quickly from my browser to the Calendar? It doesn't make much sense.
You put it so much better than I could have. It's as though software bloat is just destined to run slightly higher than Moore's Law. A Mac SE/30 with a spinning hard drive, a PowerBook G4 (also with a HDD), a 7th Gen Intel PC, an M1 Mac. All of them can open a basic app like Calendar in... 3-5 seconds. Even with nothing else running. Yet each one in that list is orders of magnitude more powerful than the previous by every measure.
Aha so that answers my question about why they haven't at least switched to USB thumb drives for their sneakernet. These aren't PCs. Probably minicomputers such as a TI-990 or similar. They don't have USB ports.
Anyone who's worked around systems in that category knows that the fact that they're replacing floppies is more scary than the fact that they're still using floppies.
Yes, the system is old and warty, but we know it. It's old Jim the warthog.
The politically grandstanding is gross. From what I can tell E-IDS has been in development since at least 2020 with a planned rollout starting in 2025.
Unfortunately web search has gotten so bad that it's hard to find past information about it.
Yeah, AI has become the only source of information that once could be gotten with Google. For example, this FAA document: https://www.faa.gov/media/70881 which I found through chat gpt. When this well is poisoned too, not sure where things are going.
Remember, this is the government we're talking about. That system was likely being worked on from 1980s to 1990s before itactually went in to implementation phase in 1990s.
Kind of makes sense for the time given hardware was evolving so rapidly after Apple and MS brought PCs to the masses; a solution deployed in 1980 was out of date by 1981.
Workers of the day were used to paper first routines; PCs on every desk were not common until the 90s when home computers, like phones in 2026, hit a fast enough for most tasks in an office constant upgrades are not necessary.
I feel like people under a certain age don't really understand this.
While we see improvements in hardware and software today, it's NOTHING like the late 80's and 90's. Our first home pc was out of date in less than a year (thank you for that recommendation, Tiger Direct). As a child, I couldn't run games that came out more than about 10-12 months after we upgraded our machine. It really was stunning to be a part of.
And now my home pc is about 4 years old, and replaced a machine that was 9. I plan to run this one for at least another 6 or 7 years unless something amazing happens that nobody sees coming.
If you didn't upgrade often, it could happen that you bought a new machine that was 10x as fast as the old one. It was just incredible how fast everything was after such an upgrade. A 486-66 to a Celeron-416 (common overclock at the time) in my case. The 486-66 was a year or two old for me - I had fished board and CPU out of the trash somewhere because before that I had a 486-33 bought in '94.
I have absolutely no understanding of ATC systems, though I would’ve thought that having a well established and (I would assume at this point) robust process of using a somewhat ancient media would reduce the attack vector of anything malicious finding its way into ATC systems.
I would love to know how often floppies are used day to day in ATC to warrant this?
Micro-services with docker running out of a kubernetes compliant blockchain with somewhere some "AI" added in the mix. I guess this news is more for PR than anything else because I don't see how the replacement of 69% of copper wire is meaningful in any way. What copper wires? Where? Is it because you removed landlines and replaced with voip?
Do they? or is it low quality media? Rather than judging old tech bad, new tech good we should look at the requirements and tradeoffs. The failure modes of the new replacement system look more catastrophic to me, relying on cloud infra and internet links.
I can't find information about how the disks are used specifically, how often they are read, written, what data they are used for, if they can be replaced by floppy emulators, etc.
12 billion for a new system that might not actually be an improvement is a lot of money.
I have some 3.5" floppy disks in the bench seat of the electric organ that came with my house that are at least that old... the three I tried worked without issue. Small sample size, but it suggests a half-life way over a couple of years; I can't imagine this system has unusually robust error correction or anything.
I never had a bad sector on 5.25-inch Double-sided, Double-Density (360K) diskettes, but I did all the time with 3.5-inch HD ones (1.44MB). I'm seeing some references to 8-inch and some to 3.5-inch disks used in the FAA, but I'm not sure what source has reliable information about that.
You've found the positive side to the fact that our government with budgets for all the money in the world can't seem to stay within 30 years of up to date technically.
If we give them more money, this is sure to improve! Monopolies and all ...
The problem is, with what media would you replace them with if you had to replace them somewhere between then and now? iomega zip drives? Jaz drives? CF cards? sony memory sticks? rewritable cds/dvds? Imation superdisks?
They could've replaced floppies multiple times, with all the certifications and hardware replacements and new procedures and regulations, and we'd still be using (a different, but still) "obsolete" medium for this now.
Agree. For a purpose-built system that is only used by trained professionals, being "up to date" really means nothing. There's only fitness for purpose.
But the cost of switching -- mainly thoroughly certifying the replacement system, retraining, and the risks of an error happening during one of those processes causing a catastrophe -- that's real.
There's no point in upgrading the storage mechanisms of arbitrary systems, or completely redoing the whole system from scratch on new hardware which would be the case here, unless it yields measurable improvements in fitness for purpose to balance against the switching costs.
When I was 10 years old, way back in 1980, I got my first 5.25" diskette from the salesman of a COMPUTER AGE shop. He got tired of watching me type in the same old BASIC listings after school and spared me the damage of it by giving me the diskette, on the provision that I let other customers use the demo APPLE II's.
Sitting here now in 2026 I have a box containing almost 3000 3.5" FHD floppy disks.
Each about 1.544 Megabytes, unless you cut the notch.
I literally dumpster dived this resource after being invited in to do so at a local electronics shop closure, some years ago now, on the proviso that I did not leave empty handed.
There are about 12 devices in my living room that can use these things, but I'll never use more than 30.
Some day, I'll see the last one go. That'll be weird.
Same. Over and over again. Every time, learning new things. And then trying to port things from one system to another is how I became a disciplined cross-platform systems software developer. And then, when C was kind of new, I bought a compiler instead of drugs and booze, like my peers at the time. Oh, what a world that has wrought!
>The FAA cited an October 13 event where a fiber optic cable connecting Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport to the FAA’s network was cut outside an airport gate, leading to the loss of data services between FAA facilities and requiring a ground stop.
Do they seriously not have a backup connection? I would have expected them to have a backup stelite or maybe even a 4G/5G mobile data system in place.
If I can use my phone as a Hotspot when Comcast is doing some service so I can work, I don't understand what idiot designed an airport without backup connections.
If you are curious: one of the most frequent problems that disables fire sprinklers is maintenance forgetting to turn the water back on. No one notices until it is too late.
No one notices the thousands of times the redundant links works just fine. We only notice when the primary has an outage and a construction crew cuts a fiber line at the same time.
Useful aphorism in general, not terribly applicable in this case. Even if it had been tested regularly, it was cut around the same time the primary failed. Regular testing doesn't stop construction crews from cutting a line.
A more useful comment might have been to say something about the depth of the backup, having only one backup connection not being enough or something.
> I don't understand what idiot designed an airport without backup connections.
I have literally spraypainted the pavement and wall - "One fibre goes here, and down on the corner there, the other fibre goes there" - just to ensure a good separation of routes. I want the pinch point to be within the rack that the routers sit in.
That airport did have two redundant connections, this was a swiss cheese failure where one was under maintenance and the other was severed by an independent event.
I was in a tower last year. They were sequencing aircraft with little loops of paper placed onto a wooden dowel. It can and should be better. Doesn't need to be whiz-bang, but it should not be paper slips and wooden sticks. (and floppy disks)
Paper flight progress strips [1] have famously resisted replacement, even though they keep trying [2].
Every 5 years or so, a different publication will write an in-depth story about how difficult they are to replace, because nothing works nearly as well, and the controllers go back to using paper every time a new system is trialed. I think I've even read about them in a cognitive psychology textbook at uni.
That is really not the worst thing about ATC. Far from it.
I have heard experienced pilots lamenting that we're still using voice on a scratchy radio, with garbled audio and people accidentally talking over other transmissions both being constant problems, for essentially all vital comms.
While I have no problem with keeping that as a fallback, there's zero reason why we shouldn't have, at least for airliners that have two pilots, a text-based communication system. We can still convert the text to speech in the cockpit to keep awareness the same, but we could play overlapping transmissions one after the other. And think of the other advantages. People wouldn't get callsigns wrong, could be alerted specially when their callsign was being talked to...
It's complicated because we will need to cooperate with all countries, but it's not like we don't have ICAO to work within.
We already have some systems in place for this, specifically stuff like ACARS and CPDLC. I suspect the issue is in congested terminal airspace, though; if you have many aicraft talking to an approach controller it is not uncommon to have multiple transmissoins at the same time.
However, approach phases are exactly the same periods when the pilots probably shouldn't be looking at their FMCs and texting. Voice communication is faster, and so is acknowledgement of voice commands, while allowing the pilots to concentrate on more critical controls. For example, in many airports it is possible to get departure clearances and such via text, but take-off clearance and taxi instructions will still be voice over radio.
This is nearly the exact reason most 'smart home' systems fail eventually. They become very brittle after the hardware gets 'old'. Where as the dumb tech from the 1950s still 'just works' and costs 1/20th of the smart switch.
In that system you can tell what is going on by looking at in a glance and works with no power. Sometimes simple is a great answer.
However, I can think of one reason the 'no power' argument fails. They do a lot by radio. That needs power. Also you would need to retrain everyone. Oh and you probably would get locked into one company that wants to control the whole software stack and sell tons of support.
I have a friend who is a real estate agent for the wealthy. He laughs at the people who automate their homes. The automation inevitably fails, the vendor has disappeared, and the owner is faced with ripping all the wiring out of the walls and replacing it. Usually it gets replaced with conventional wiring.
When my home was built in 1999, I poured over all the home automation systems. I opted for conventional wiring. But I did wire every room (myself) with cat5 cable and RG6 coax, in a star configuration. It has served me very well, no problems at all.
I don't use the RG6 anymore, as my TV service comes over the intertoobs now. The cat5 isn't supposed to work with gigabit equipment, but it works fine. Wifi has improved by leaps and bounds, but I still rely on hardwired ethernet, as it is stupid reliable.
> I did wire every room (myself) with cat5 cable and RG6 coax
I think the best idea is to install conduit as the house is built, so that outdated wires can be replaced with newer wires by just tying the end of the old wire to the end of the new wire and pulling.
Just be sure to inspect the house as it is being built, because I think one user on HN wrote that conduit was required by law, but when he went to swap the wires, he couldn't pull them - he discovered there was only pipe in the visible terminations, not the whole route.
So my mother worked at a bank when she was in college. This is the 70s. Later in life she went back to work, in the 90s, at a bank. When the computers went down and they had to close the books on paper and she was the only one that knew how to do it.
There is something to be said for knowing how to deal with critical systems when the automation breaks.
My grandpa used to be a manual typesetter in the newspaper industry and retired in the 80s.
A few decades later, similar story, he came back to work part time, when desktop publishing was all the rage.
Welp, of course the computers went down.
So they fired up the old hot metal typesetting machines and he manually set all 100,000 words of that Newspaper by hand, and then they went to print using 19th century steam powered print lines.
Except, that story is total bullshit that I made up. Because "the computer went down" is something we can mitigate much easier than doing everything by hand.
Sometimes the old technology actually is objectively worse, inefficient, and obsolete. Like floppy disks, or manually having humans close the books at a bank.
Better in what way? They have avoided replacement specifically because they work extremely well and none of the alternatives have been demonstrably better.
Those things actually work great, not everything has to be modernized for modernization sake... that's how we get cars with touchscreens instead of buttons and knobs.
a mechanical (wood, paper , etc) state machine is very resilient and easy to read even from across the room. No electricity demands, no lighting needed. Contains it's own mutual-exclusion (only one person can modify it at any time).
the digital version would require 10+ endpoints with 1000x points of failure.
I'm more interested with the data integrity protections before the data got onto the floppy, and why those protocols (e.g. signature verification) couldn't be completed via email at the endpoint.
You're going to run that on a computer from the late 1980s or early 1990s? And how do you get the data onto those computers when they're not connected to a network, or the same network, as your other systems?
I don't want the FAA to make changes at "lightning speed" or "rapidly moving to make upgrades" or "record pace". Safety must be further down the list for these guys.
I've worked on systems this decade that still relied on floppy disks. It's getting harder and harder for them to operate because the disks are getting rarer, as are the drives. And often the essential component is not the disk itself. There are some other computers in the system that cannot be upgraded to any more recent device, systems from the 1980s and 1990s that force them to continue using a floppy disk.
If it was just two modern computers and transferring data between them, the floppy disk would have been dropped in a heartbeat. But it's the old computers still in the critical path that are holding everything back. And those are really hard to maintain. Last year we phased out a system that was dependent on computers from the mid-1990s, getting replacement parts was practically impossible, they mostly just don't exist. You'd buy old systems off ebay and hope that they had enough working parts to scavenge, and the right working parts.
EDIT: Light editing because I had some extra words.
There was a time when the company I was working for was selling service contracts for DEC TZ30 tape drives to DEC itself because their own internal service organization was unwilling or unable to support them.
The application was software distribution, most likely to customers they were contractually obligated to support, and no newer drives were able to write the required tape format, so upgrading to newer drives wasn't an option.
Systems are dynamic, not static. There are secondary consequences and forgotten/ignored opportunity costs. Sure, the existing system has proven workarounds, though labor and attention intensive. When a floppy disk fails it won't directly create disaster. But these legacy requirements do block the more cohesive and thorough introduction of additional safety mechanisms that increase redundancy and reduce the scope of possible human error - such as new sensor hardware and their automation, latency improvements, and information synthesis/notification clarity.
Here's a software analogy - required support for very old OS versions often interferes with the scope, simplicity, and security of new feature work, and even if the work is still feasible at that point it is slowed down greatly, eating up attention and time that could go towards addressing other important issues. That accumulates over time, and cumulative loss of improvements that could have otherwise been made has a real effect in unprevented disasters and wasted controller availability.
It's both time tested and at risk of ripping at the seams. Floppy disks and the mechanisms still wear. And because neither are still made, the chances of a zero population scenario happening is greater every year.
It's better to test a replacement while you still have the time, than to risk rushing something else.
The overall reliability of a system is time invariant... its either reliable, or not.
The fact that it has gone x days without an incident doesnt upgrade or downgrade its reliability. The engineering and processes are function in an equation that calculates mean time to failure. Life-critical processes have numbers placed to this... like a failure every 50 years or 100 years... or 100000 years, and you work towards solving that.
Fortunately the choice isn't between 1980s hardware with floppy disk requirements and rented servers in someone else's building. There are a lot of options in between those two.
> “We’re moving away from outdated, manual processes and replacing technology that once relied on floppy disks with a modern system that allows controllers to instantly share critical flight alerts, restricted airspace schedules and pilot reports,"
So they make their systems run on the internet now?
In my carreer I have seen plenty of system integrations working on ftp'ing request response documents to file folders on "SaaS" systems while the SV boys were considering SOAP obsolete and overnight Cobol and RPG mainframes document sincs while they were waxing about microservises and noSQL.
> The greatest nation in the world deserves a state-of-the-art air traffic control system, and under President Trump, we’re delivering just that
They are signalling Trumps involvement so I will assume it must be another vanity project he wants to stamp his name on. I look forward to hundreds of grounded planes due to cloud based weather reporting not being available because of a borked server update or misconfigured wifi adapter.
I have heard of exploits that can root a machine from inserting a USB device (in fact, this has been used by attackers to conspicuously leave thumb drives in the parking lots of organizations they want to attack).
I have never heard of a sploit that roots your machine from inserting a floppy.
true, there were viruses, and they came over floppy. but USB has a hidden firmware layer. I remember one on Apple a few years ago they said is completely un-patchable because it affected the firmware on the USB chip itself. I dont remember what happened after that, though.
why is this "historic"? the thirst for this admin to use the most bombastic language possible is so tiring.
Just... modernize the thing already. thats your job. It's not impressive that you did this. You're supposed to do this. You dont get extra kudos for doing the thing you signed up to do...
and dont forget to put Trump's name at the beginning. Or he might get cranky
Everything they try to spin positively has to be 'historic' because:
1. The party leader is a fragile, dying narcissist who is desperate for his name to be attached to anything other than the misery he's inflicted upon the world.
2. Their _actual_ historic achievements are all war crimes, human rights violations, and policy changes that would terrify their average supporter if they actually understood the long-term consequences.
The inability to keep the air traffic control system effective and maintainable is far more embarrassing than the inability to update the IRS software or build a high-speed rail.
I have a bad feeling that this is not going to end well. Especially given that this administration is... Rather incompetent. I hope that safety is like number one on their list of priorities but somehow I doubt it
> Engineers of today aren't better than engineers of yesterday
Our ability to wield technology has gone up, while our ability to engineer and understand that technology (as a whole) has gone down.
Age should be the most suspect of arguments against the design of a system. Enumerate specifically its flaws and not just that it is old. System design doesn't wear out, it is abstract, like mathematics.
Every time I'm in a place of business with shiny computers, I'm reminded of the difference in efficiency between the newest systems and the 'green screen' terminals and other similar tech that was everywhere in 1990.
Most of those were extremely optimized for their specific purposes - for instance, screens were carefully designed to fit all the necessary information to complete a task without any scrolling. They had extremely low latency despite all the hardware being potato-grade compared to what we have today.
When latency existed, simple things like the keyboard buffer allowed the skilled user to get ahead of the machine and move onto another task, while the processing caught up.
Today, it's all a webapp with a ton of React, probably 5,000 npm modules, and you get to watch skeletal loading rectangles pulsating after every click (or branded animations on the "customer-facing" flavor). Instead of having muscle memory of hands on a keyboard (usually a specialized one which gave a dedicated key to every important function), the user must move their arm to find touch targets placed at arbitrary places across a 24" touchscreen, and often hunting for functions inside ••• menus.
Obviously, no usability testing has been done on any of these. Or if it has, the only thing tested was "Can a 17-year-old with zero skills ploddingly complete a transaction (the happy path only!), after only 15 minutes of training?"
So yeah, I never listen to any "newer = better" takes.
I worked on a lot of those "green screen" (or "orange screen") apps.
Limited to keyboard and 24x80 screen, but yes, the apps were lean & responsive -- sub-second response time, and keyboard muscle memory. And some shops I worked in capped your DB calls to <25 per transaction. In stark contrast to some of the Laravel apps I've worked in recent years where the SQL logs showed me 300-400+ DB calls on a given request :(
You can justify any waste with that argument. Saying things will cost lives is just a way to interject bureaucracy to slow down a project. You are the enemy of progress even if you don't realize it.
Far from it. I know for a fact the civil service (normally) doesn't change per administration. But the key word is "normally". Pretty much nothing this administration has done is normal. Do you really expect most of the people involved in this transition to know what they're doing, given that many of them are yes-men?
I agree, nothing says poor priorities like upgrading the air traffic control system. It removes the opportunity for graft, only supports the monied elite who can afford to fly and don't care about climate change, and diminishes the opportunities for crises to exploit.
Instead, the United States government should have continued the policies and values that led to Next Gen, ERAM, STARS, and AAS.
what do you mean. a lot of poor people fly as well. I won't would even risk to say that poor people fly more often. For example migrant workers flying lets say Bulgaria-Ireland every few months
I think what readthenotes1 is trying to say is what I was hinting at in my comment: this administration cannot be trusted to do this properly or in the service of actually making the ATC system better. They're instead doing it because the 1% says that modern == better (which for a safety-critical system is usually not actually true). The proper thing this administration should be doing is to do this as a failover at first but keep the existing ATC system running until the new system is just as safe and as capable as the original, but I get the feeling they won't do that.
I worked on modernization in the FAA specifically around digitizing NOTAMs.
I would urge you not to consider this modernization from the perspective you may be familiar, as someone who may work on the bleeding edge and sometimes sees a lack of caution from engineers pushing for change.
The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.
One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.
I get the idea that the current administration is pushing safety to the side, but there is another risk where safety becomes a blocker to reasonable change.
When I left that work (more than 15 years ago) it was clearly a blocker.
This isn't like COBOL. Floppy disc were never reliable. They should've been phased out a long time ago
Magnetic degradation, wear from read/write heads, and environmental sensitivity mean disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long. And they are also easy to corrupt from all kinds of magnetic sources around us.
I get other stuff, even DOS like system. Safety critical software/hardware that was battle tested makes sense. Not floppy. Sometime it's just bureaucracy.
My floppies outlived many many models of usb thumb drives. I can still read floppies I recorded 30 years ago.
And I went through dozens looking for one that worked. Ymmv.
My experience has been both. I remember, years ago, occasionally having the problem of going through many to find one with no bad sectors. But, a few years back, I dumped all my old floppies, and very few of them had issues.
I wonder if quality control was bad. It seems like the disks that were good 30 years ago are still good.
Me too, and I didn't need to wait 30 years for that. They were corrupted when floppies were still the default.
My Commodore Amiga 500 floppies from the late 1980ies still work. I went nostalgic a couple months ago, booted about eight of those floppies and all worked. They were probably kept dry the hole time, but I did move several times, they were in boxes in cellars and in garages.
> were never reliable
They absolutely mog the cancerous garbage that is NAND flash memory in terms of data retention. The fact that you can pick an 1980s floppy from the junk room and read it is telling. Meanwhile your average TLC SSD will probably get wiped in 3 years if kept in the drawer, and a QLC will get wiped in 1 year.
Reliability wise floppies are also better: flash memory leaks electrons naturally and gets shredded by radiation events, with temperaure accelerating these processes. Meanwhile magnetic disks are not altered by any normal magnetic field you could produce at home.
Survivorship bias. Floppies failed all the time. Flash can be unreliable if you’re talking about the cheapest or abused the wrong way, but flash SSDs handled wisely are much better than hdds , which in turn are much better than floppies.
If you compare the thumb stick that came free from a convention then compare it to a floppy that came free with a magazine. And in the end neither matters because they’re both cheapest possible junk, not fair examples of the tech.
Similarly, the cheapest led bulbs (put in poorly ventilated fittings) have crappy lifetimes, but that’s not the techs fault, it’s because they weren’t engineered to last, they are cheap crap. Well designed leds placed sensibly are vastly better than bulbs, but that’s hidden by the cheap end of the market
That is the first I ever saw the term "mog" used outside of bodybuiy/looksmaxxing.
More info here: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mog
This is just flatly false. You're comparing a worst case SSD with maybe 10% of its writes left to an extremely lucky floppy disk that hasn't died to binder hydrolysis, mold and fungal growth, warping or demagnetization. And you also completely made up that you couldn't generate a strong enough magnetic field at home to corrupt one - you absolutely could especially since rare earth magnets are not that uncommon and are more than enough to kill a floppy.
"mog"?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/mog
There's flash, and then there's flash.
Say, the Siemens PLCs I earn my living programming uses SD cards which range from 64kB to, uh, 128MB, methinks.
They still work after decades, so clearly, you can get long term reliable flash storage; just don't expect to be able to store your 4k holiday videos on them.
NOTAMs, on the other hand? Go ahead!
my 1980s 5.25" disks still work. i'm surprised but they have laster a long time.
I used to do floppy disk data recovery as a service for students at college. Roughly speaking, we helped one student out every three hours, out of 2,500 students, during busy hours. Based on the rates and hours, I think it would come out to something like 25% of the student body, each year, coming to us with a data loss incident involving floppy disks.
YMMV. I’m sure a lot of people were shoving these things into backpacks, and this was post-2000, so the quality of disks for sale was poorer than it was in the 90s and 80s.
I’ve also (since then, for myself) repaired drives. The drives fail because they’re mechanical and have motors, and anything that moves or has a motor in it will need some kind of service. Servicing a floppy drive requires specialized equipment which is hard to find (or requires a lot of patience—it’s possible to repair a floppy drive with just a screwdriver, but it’s not fun; guess how I know?)
3.5" disks were much much worse.
HD floppies were much worse, both 1.44MB and 1.2MB. They are just much more susceptible to defects from wear and tear because of the shrunken sector size. DD 3.5" wasn't as bad.
Do you know the reason why?
3.5" floppies were still common while I was in college. I have distinct memories of copying a project to a floppy in my dorm room, popping the disk out, walking next door (literally next door in the dorms, not even going outside up or down stairs or anything), popping the disk into a team member's PC and the project being gone. We laughed it off and chucked the disk in the trash and got another. Project wasn't lost-lost since I had a copy on my hard disk. This was also the era of the 100MB Zip Drives, which I also had in my PC and thankfully all of our lab PCs had, too. That's what I normally used for all of my day-to-day file transfers of any real import. I still have my zip disks, but I seem to have lost my zip drive, so no idea if the disks still have any data on them.
I was on a school paper in high school and was taking photos on a "digital" camera that wrote to 3.5" floppies. Some of them are still with the (printed) copies of my articles I kept. I'll have to see if they survived.
This is probably my "I'm getting old" moment. Good lord.
Sony Mavica?
Yeah at the time. You would get the whole range of good/bad disks. Sometimes even between computers. May work just fine on one computer and not the next. It was not common but it wasnt totally rare either. Just sometimes would catch out out at silly times.
That they are still used in a critical infra item is a bit surprising. Getting new stock would be a major hassle.
Wow, it's crazy how experiences differ! I've never encountered anything more unreliable than zip disks. Even burned CDs lost to the dreaded buffer couldn't compete with the failure rate of those things. Past me wishes I had your luck with them, they were super cool.
We used to copy files three times, better onto three separate floppies
I said this in a parallel thread but 3.5" disks were much less reliable for me even in the 80s with the Amiga.
You had personal PCs but no network in a dorm?
I'm placing that comment between 1985 and 1993.
Nah. 83 is much too early for everyone having a pc in the dorm room, and well after 1993 for dorms often not having network.
Depends on the schools for networks. I attended a college that finished adding wired networks to their dorms in 2000 or so. It just wasn't a campus priority in the 90s, fewer students had computers back then. If it was a school with more money or an engineering school they got to it earlier, the rest added it when they added it.
Also depends on the environment. My dad used to repair the pre-PC computers: Amiga, Commodore, Atari, Spectrum, etc. I've had access to them before many others have even seen a computer. I've been given a really heavy, not-completely-broken and usable laptop before they became affordable for normal people.
People who grew up with or lived in the tech environment had access to lots of things.
Until quite recently, my Dad had a Zip drive plugged into an ancient Pentium box (back when "Pentium" meant "successor to 486"). I don't know when it was last actually used, but it's LED had been on since the 90s.
Sure, but what are the odds they're using these rather than HD 3.5" disks purchased from whatever new old stock they've been able to source over the past 20-odd years?
and how many bits have rotted on those?
I am still able to play all the games on them and recovered my terminal program I wrote in the 80s as well:
https://github.com/spullara/pcterm128
“Modern” disks were not that good though.
> disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long
You really have no idea what you are talking about. It's normal for floppies, especially 3.5" to last decades just sitting on a shelf. I've got 5.25" floppies from 1984, and they boot just fine on my old apple //e.
42 years in my parent's dank midwest basement.
Of course some will last longer. It's not a cliff, just "not recommended to use for longer than...". But a lot depends on the conditions of storage, how much usage they got, etc. Manufacturers gave them 10-20 years normally, which puts almost all of them in the not recommended territory.
The fact people have old working floppies doesn't change the fact that degradation happens.
Why do you write it as “Apple forward slash forward slash E”?
If i remember correctly that Apple //E used that notation itself in its startup message and on various screens in AppleWorks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIe
Check the logo on the picture on the right.
I suppose it just seems weird to write “//e” when it’s the “Apple two E” and II is the universally accepted Roman numeral notation for the number two.
That's how it was named. The bootscreen didn't say Apple IIe. It's Apple //e. with slashes. That's how it was in all the docs and any software and the bootrom.
Call it weird if you want, but that's what the name was.
It’s a cultural tic. Been around for decades. Those same folks also write “Apple ][“ to refer to the original Apple II.
It's a cultural tic to refer to something by its name.
You should check the actual manual: http://applelogic.org/files/AIIEREF.pdf
First, the cover uses italic sans-serif “I” characters, not forward slashes. It’s pretty clear if you’re familiar with typography.
Second, the body of the document uses neither. It uses the standard upright I character.
Is it it's name tho? Legally and culturally, do they have the power to name it?
*its
I mean, like you want to name your dog Bell character, right-to-left character, Bell character, 0-width space. Can you do that legally? Can you do that culturally? Would that become the dog's name in most of the senses?
Random characters in Apple product names is similar territory, although less extreme.
I remember losing half the light cues for a show because we tried to reload from the 3.5" floppy and it was corrupted.
Your writing like checksums aren’t existing. They exist!
I’ve bought some 15 year old floppies recently. They work. Had just to learn, that formatting them is required. In handling they are like SD-Cards.
Which is far better than the CDs, DVDs, Bluerays or records (you now…this big black discs with a needle).
And you don’t have to worry about network attackers. And we checksum everything from the network. For good reasons.
The more expensive blurays are quite long lasting, being non-dye based.
Absent doing something wildly abusive, vinyl records will play fine for a long time. And the degradation is comparatively graceful.
Source: go to any used record shop and find a copy of Chicago >5[0]. It'll almost certainly play, even if the music wasn't particularly good to start with.
[0] There are many copies of later Chicago albums in used record stores.
I'd learned long ago to treat floppies like Mission Impossible tape reels, and just assume the data would self-destruct in about 5 seconds.
And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive and it’s not because usb drives are reliable.
Without having details on the specific floppy disks in question there’s no way you can authoritatively say they are unreliable. They absolutely produced floppy disks that were far more reliable than the ones sourced from the cheapest vendor possible some of us used in school back in the day. Ignoring the fact I’m guessing the disks in question aren’t having to survive life in a students backpack.
Ohhh, don't compare magnetic backup tapes to floppy. Same designs underneath but completely different storage shell, delivery mechanism, even the coating is different.
One cost $100 another $1.
Then these tapes are typically write once read many.
They were designed to deal with floppy disk flaws consumers deal with.
Actually really cool to read about modern tape systems.
I had a customer with a slightly dusty office and we simply gave up on tape drives as a backup storage medium because we were replacing the drives or tapes on a monthly basis.
We switched them over to external USB enclosures with cheap SATA drives in them and never looked back.
> And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive
Is it because "long-term archival" strategies aren't updated frequently?
It's because magnetic storage where the drive bearings are separated from the media can be expected to sit on properly temperature controlled shelf for 50 years with next to no bit rot, in contrast to flash.
Magnetic storage system are pretty cool, barium ferrite magnetic tapes being coated on them is interesting too
What would you have suggested in the 1980s instead of a floppy disk? And today?
If you have enough floppy disks they are a perfectly reliable solution.
50% of the time it works every time!
And yet they’ll replace it with some cloud-native monstrosity that will get hacked by an unhinged GPT.
Say what you will about floppies. There’s something to be said for a system that’s air-gapped by default.
>The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.
If this is the case, why was an airport knocked offline due to a cut fiber optic? A safety focused system would have a backup system say satellite or mobile 4G/5G. But they didn't have such.
This isn't about safety. Its about bureaucracy wrapped up as safety.
The primary was being inspected and the secondary failed.
There were two independent systems.
Which is why many systems on most airliners are redundant in threes (though under double fault may operate in a degraded mode).
There was a third system, the fallback they used to prevent loss of life, legacy systems and a system shutdown.
You can argue thats not a sufficient third redundancy, I don't have enough context to throw an opinion out there on the safety of this particular infrastructure project.
I am confident that the fallback process was considered and kept in place as the tertiary backup.
Excellent point though. It took me some thinking to put myself back in SRM mindset and what they'd have considered here.
> Which is why many systems on most airliners are redundant in threes
Not really. Triplex redundancy is based on a failure model where failures can produce arbitrary output. Three systems allows majority voting (often, median select) to provide correct output in the presence of a single arbitrary failure. It allows detection of double-fail-silent failures and uncorrelated double failures, but that's not really the point, since continued operation under these conditions is at risk, and failing nonoperational isn't often acceptable for these systems. (You'll also see quadruplex systems that use the same voting mechanism to detect and disable failed channels, allowing handling two arbitrary non-simultaneous failures, for systems that need a longer window of continued operation after failure.)
If you change the failure modes, you change the architecture. These days you often see dual-dual systems where each pair of systems cross-checks and disables itself on mismatch, converting a single arbitrary failure to a single silent failure; which then allows downstream systems to accept inputs from two such fail-silent systems and trust either that is providing output, removing the need for a median select.
Very interesting, I’d love to learn more. Is there anything you’d recommend in terms of a general introduction to different kinds of fault tolerance? Literature, video material, could be whatever.
Unfortunately this has been on-the-job learning for me over the last few decades so I don't have great sources to point you to, but this is covered in systems engineering courses for aerospace and automotive applications.
Same thing with control-theory - there’s so much established knowledge out there that one really needs to know but which isn’t taught to kids in uni or even postgrad level. Learning these things on-the-job means you don’t know what you don’t know…
What’s a better way? We still don’t have state-regulation/certification for software in safety critical systems, which terrifies me when I think about it.
We have DO-178C for aviation, which (a) is a pretty good standard and (b) is a heck of a lot better than ISO26262. It's "voluntary", but it's the only game in town, so…
The 747 had 4 independent hydraulic systems (one for each engine). There were still failures that took out all 4. What comes to mind is the one where the rear pressure bulkhead failed (due to a faulty repair), and the decompression took out the rudder and all 4 hydraulics.
The pilot no longer had flight controls. He desperately tried to control the airplane using variable thrust, but it just wasn't good enough, and crashed into a mountainside.
The fix was to add automatic valves in the lines so loss of pressure wouldn't bleed out the whole system.
JAL 123
“Two is one and one is none” as the saying goes.
> The primary was being inspected
So in reality you didn't have two systems.
otherwise you would have shut down operations until you had another connection live, so you had 2 online connections.
Ok but downtime isn't the same as failure. Downtime means planes can't take off. Failure means people die.
An more important question is what do they plan to replace it with?
>If this is the case, why was an airport knocked offline due to a cut fiber optic? A safety focused system would have a backup system say satellite or mobile 4G/5G. But they didn't have such.
There is a strong difference between an airport going down and ATC causing and accident.
Uptime isn't safety, they have very orthogonal characteristics.
Ridiculous false dichotomy. The bureaucracy can get in the way sometimes, but ultimately it is about safety, and the FAA has done an amazing job over the past several decades regulating the skies and played a massive role in making aviation as safe as it is. Standards are rigid and very well defined and change slowly because aviation is an industry where mistakes create massive disasters. There is some collateral inefficiency from things moving slow but thats way preferable to the collateral damage that would be caused by "move fast break things".
Although you were generally right, you can't say that after the parties between Boeing and FAA agents, nor FAA using Boeing consultants to inspect Boeing, fail inspections, still pass them, crash 4 planes and be humiliated by having Boeing Max flight permissions only revoked by the European authority. And the Macdonnell history with FAA says it is not new.
I Googled this exact phrase: "Macdonnell history with FAA". Woah, that is quite a complex history. It is a good read for those unaware.
Macdonnell was bought by Boeing, and the legend says it's precisely this _expertise_ that Boeing bought. The Boeing self-burning batteries and wrongly-handcrafted airframes of 2013 are signature of Macdonnell's way of managing issues.
Really going to ignore what happened between FAA and Boeing with the MAX?
The assumption that moving slower and more bureaucratically increases safety and reliability is one of the most harmful myths out there.
The problem is that in the FAA's domain, there are legitimately situations where bureaucracy is indispensable. For example, they just issued an AD to require inspections of a few specific bolts on early production 787s because Boeing thinks they MAY have bolted the wings on with incorrectly sized shims, which over a decade MAY contribute to accelerated fatigue on these parts. Not a single plane has crashed but this kind of thing has caused other planes to crash in the past.
These airplanes are flying all over the world, the inspections need ultrasonic data, and the FAA has to validate that all of them are done. Even identifying this issue required lots of bureaucracy.
Multiply that by the number of airplanes and airplane models and it's easy to see why they move so slowly: when you are putting millions of people in the air each day, enforcing absurdly specific rules with an iron fist requires a monster of a bureaucracy.
But moving faster and without accountability is generally worse.
In a perfect world, we would move at a steady pace, as to keep up with the world but without rushing, and people would be accountable without a heavy bureaucratic processes.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works in practice, at least not for long, so between the two, we usually favor the slow and bureaucratic process when safety and reliability matter.
In fact, it's created a bunch of risks. Like the fact that nobody manufacturers floppy disks or floppy disk readers anymore.
I can understand not changing a system for change sake, but the floppy disk has been obsolete for nearly 20 years now. It's been hard to find a floppy disk reader for the last 10 years. Going so slow that you can't respond to that change is far FAR too slow.
I worked for a salesforce partner and we spent the two years I was there working with a large ag equipment manufacturer. They had two legacy systems that were still (as I was told) some combination of Fortran and early Unix systems. They had been reluctant to upgrade them because one of the their main manufacturing machines was still running on it and they were terrified if they upgraded and something went wrong, it would cost them millions in production time.
As you pointed out, you can't find floppy discs or disc manufacturers any more. I do remember one of the VP's of this company saying as long as they keep teaching Fortran to college engineers, they have no reason to upgrade yet. That got a few raised eyebrows from our team. We relented and upgraded what they were comfortable with - but man oh man it was quite the eye opener for me as a young dev how the thought processes of the people running these companies really are.
Fortran is still used in scientific computing.
As long as those manufacturing systems were air-gapped and working, I can understand being conservative with changes. Of course at some point you're at risk of hardware failures too, for things that are likely NLA.
> Of course at some point you're at risk of hardware failures too, for things that are likely NLA.
Yeah, that's really the biggest issue with these systems. Were I one of these manufacturers I'd invest in getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware. The last thing they'll want to deal with is that their software was written for Sun Spark and that no longer exists.
That said, hard to go wrong porting over the x86 at this point.
> ...getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware.
Some of the signal control infrastructure for the Melbourne rail network was ported over to an emulated PDP-11 System for this reason. This was previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514553
“NLA”?
no longer available
Fortran is still the choice for Nuclear Engineering too.
My understanding, from a long retired uncle (after a 40 year career at the National Institues of Health writing nothing but Fortran), is that Claude writes perfectly idiomatic, performant Fortran. Which I suppose is not a surprise given how it was trained, but I still found amusing to hear.
Have the idioms of Fortran changed much over the decades? Because idiomatic C++ today is unrecognizable to how people had to write for VC++ Win32 until well-until the 2010s.
Yes, infamously so. It was fixed-width at one point.
My humbling Claude experience was pointing at a codebase it took me weeks to get to a good 2003 standard, and watch it do the next fifteen years, cleanup, refactoring, feature additions that needed the tech debt solved I never got round to first, in minutes.
Linux 7.4 got fixes for floppy disk handling, as recently as yesterday!
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
A bit odd that they didn't at least update to using USB thumb drives. Those are readily available and at least as reliable as magnetic floppy disks.
Yeah, that's what I'd have expected especially because I believe the USB mass media standard was part of the original standard. You'd need no special drivers to work with a modern USB thumb drive even if you are dealing with windows 98 (Win95 had usb support, but I believe you still had to install the drivers for it).
Not only drivers. The initial release of Windows 95 predates USB itself, so the entire USB stack didn't appear until later OEM service releases that AFAIK were never released as updates for existing installs or even as retail products (unless you count MSDN or OEM System Builder products with their associated license restrictions).
You can get floppy disks and USB-C floppy drives on Amazon. Drives are under $20.
It was bad enough in 1986 when F-16 pilots had to bring their own cassette players on missions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVHEFiLQ3GU
The old man in me says this is a reference to the movie "Iron Eagle", without clicking on the link. :)
Creating a rigorous process to ensure safety will create somewhat of a bureaucracy.
But creating a bureaucracy doesn't mean you've created a rigorous process to ensure safety.
Yup, it can create a situation where you have a huge incentive towards workarounds and hacky fixes because doing it properly incurs huge costs. This is especially bad when a fundamentally quite bad design makes it through certification (most processes don't really prevent this).
Presumably such a confident assertion is based on sufficient actual experience with slower safety protocols such that you can state, positively, that faster-moving processes produce safer, human-life critical, systems... ?
You really, really need to work in industrials controls before your opinion carries weight on this - there are plenty of 40 year old systems humming along keeping the world turning that are bulletproof reliable.
'Move fast and break things' is fine when the result of failure is someone failing to make a billion dollars at their IPO. It's not acceptable in the world where failure means dams break, reactors go supercritical, planes collide, or other similarly apocalyptic scenarios.
Yes - but those examples don't all have the same risk modalities. With dams and reactors, most failure variables can be permanently contained by initial system design/engineering and construction quality, continually inspected surroundings and internals, and physics certainty. Human inputs are limited and daily inspection matters, but any momentary error or lapse of operator attention won't result in instant destruction. You have hours and days with Dams, minutes and hours with reactors. In aviation it only takes a split second.
Aviation involves constant unpredictable human inputs and physical states. Hundreds of vehicles, not installations designed to have as few moving parts as possible. It is not yet solved, the status quo merely has a societally tolerable death rate. There can be new sensor hardware, more safety redundancies, and info synthesis/notification interfaces that are currently blocked by old hardware bottlenecks. Controller and pilot time and attention is limited, and it can be wasted less.
> Controller and pilot time and attention is limited, and it can be wasted less.
And inversely... when pilots leave too much to automation, their skills may degrade to the point that by the time you actually need a capable human crew because something has gone terribly wrong, the capability of that crew has degraded too much, and the FAA has warned about this in the past [1].
[1] https://medium.com/faa/the-dangers-of-overreliance-on-automa...
I feel a bit weird that I'm fairly certain that I read this discussion a while ago, in another post...
The FAA doesn't run airports.
The fiber cut was to the Philadelphia TRACON facility, which is run by the FAA. Also, the FAA runs the towers at airports, unless it's a contract facility. No idea how the infra is handled at contract facilities, but I'd be shocked if it didn't follow FAA guidelines, such that the FAA is dictating the levels of redundancy available.
Also, there's a big difference between a small towered airport in a more rural area, and a major international airport with 10x or more the commercial traffic. So there's probably some difference of buildout depending on the facility usage.
Quick edit: looks like there were two fiber cut incidents recently, one at an airport last month, and the TRACON issue that happened 1.5 months ago!
You may recall we went on an orgy of firing federal workers and cutting “waste fraud and abuse”. That impacted engineering, operations and boring jobs like finance and contracts. After the helicopter / airliner collision in DC they accelerated a bunch of stuff to show fire and motion.
Backhoes can disrupt connections, but so can failures to pay bills.
Systems like the radar in question often cannot work with broadband and satellite links.
Engineering will not save you from incompetent governance.
The presence of bureaucracy doesn't mean safety isn't the main consideration, it also isn't a given that bureaucracy is a negative in this instance. The safety record speaks for itself: you are safer in a commercial airplane than just about anywhere else you can go.
And yet with the 747MAX we saw that bureaucrats at the FAA were heavily influenced by Boeing.
The adage is that “you can’t test quality into a product.” The FAA stands as a final test that you attempted to rigorously engineer for safety, but that is no substitute for a company culture that prioritizes safety. It’s like when you release a bug to production and you turn around and blame QA. Yes they missed it but so did you.
And "bureaucracy" really means "grift".
> The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.
In one role, I worked on writing software for drones.
That very rigorous process was very reassurring to me. Reasonable progress was absolutely occurring.
> One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.
What kind of risks were you looking at with what kinds of balances, if you're able to share?
I liked the process but i didnt see a counter pressure to the SRM process. It often became a hard blocker.
The SRM board knew the legacy system but much less the modern one. Its hard to compare safety when you only clearly understand one systems safeguards.
I appreciate the process being there but at the time it felt much more like (some) people protecting their jobs than the public.
The risks I felt were overblown (iirc) were around likelihood of catastrophic failure in the system.
I actually loved the overall process and it informed how I look at software, it was the application of the process that bothered me.
Thanks for clarifying! I also really liked the SRM process.
Insomuch as people protecting their jobs: that's always a thing. But I honestly felt that people wanted to protect their jobs because they wanted to protect the public. Some people definitely wanted to keep their work and personal life separate with solid 9-to-5 boundaries. That's perfectly OK too. It was helpful to be inclusive of them even if their time was already filled.
I worked with numerous people who didn't understand all of the components or systems. We took it upon ourselves to be very open to questions and to thoroughly explain how each thing works. I've found if someone had good understanding of one component but didn't understand another component, it was very useful to schedule time with them to walk through the components they didn't understand to try to alleviate their concerns. They might not know what questions to ask, so I would instead ask questions about their well-known components to try to understand and correlate to newer components. Perhaps their concerns were even justified but they didn't know how to articulate them!
Maybe this was an HQ problem over a lower level problem.
Iirc there were 1 or 2 people who could hold the process up and were not open to persuasion.
I was also young and less equipped to handle that.
I worked in a few other spaces and liked a slightly more balanced approach.
Silicon Valley style approach is not what id strive for at the FAA. I dont think that is the extreme they have swung to either.
If you make a change and then your change leads to a plane crash that's bad for you.
If you don't make a change and then there's a plane crash that's not your problem.
Rules and regulations in aviation are written in blood. Moving fast is not a virtue when the industry is already as safe as it is. Even if the change is to something objectively better with no drawbacks, the act of change itself creates risk for accidents.
Basically when accident rates are already very low, even a small amount of transitional risk can add up to offset years of marginal improvements. So the burden of proof rests heavily on the proposer of change to a system that already is working reliably.
Agreed. If the floppy system fulfills it's purpose safely, why switch for the sake of it? New stuff can be better, when it's better integrated or even if it's just easier to use (less errors) but old tech in and of itself isn't bad.
Within this is a further heartening reassurance that I chose a profession I will be able to do until my dying day. But at 55 I see my safest option is my own business where some higher up doesn't take me off a role I improve to give it to someone they know.
> One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.
Can you recall anything that that engineer said or did which turned out to be credible? Or which you perhaps learned from?
This is great. Question was, did you folks consider simply replacing these with Goteks and / or testing something just a bit more reliable while digitizing these NOTAMs?
Our project was SRM evaluation for digitizing NOTAMs but there may have been other parallel processes I was unaware of.
The SV (silicon valley) motto of fail fast and break things accelerated evolution of software design systems. Can you imagine what would happen if people were hesitant to use Git works because a merge could break something? Lol.
But this kind of precaution is quite necessary in the development of AI systems. Current regulations have turned a blind eye to accelerate software and AI progress. Now we have security bugs and misalignments, and we will have AI misalignments as well.
Knowing how computing landscape has changed in SV, I can't imagine modern day SV helping fix FAA systems. Alternatively we could go with multiple incarnations of the same system, being battle tested and proven with independent concurrences, alongside current FAA system. Yeah, it is a boatload of money, and probably wasting 90 percent of it in redundancy.
> Can you imagine what would happen if people were hesitant to use Git works because a merge could break something? Lol.
Version control was always something that was adopted more by process-heavy organizations until the popularization of GitHub. Before that, it was common for the move-fast type of developers to eschew version control.
Earlier in my career, people didn't bother with the chore of using version control unless they were working on an important project that demanded it.
Even though it wasn't part of the curriculum, I learned to use Git (and Mercurial) before I finished school. I found it pretty useful then even for school projects that were, by their nature, solo projects that would never see the light of day. I didn't find Git super burdensome.
Idk, I feel like the difficulty of Git (which is real in some respects) has long been exaggerated by people who are categorically unwilling to RTFM.
One place I applied to 'hmm think we toss it onto sourcesafe once and awhile'. It was their main product. They had about 15 people working on it. Plus one big ol folder on that one machine that was 'the builds'.
Some slight rigor shows you are not just doing whatever. I found most projects once you scale past 2 or 3 people and your 3rd release you basically are forced into some sort source control. Or it is a game of 'what file did they break today and I have to spend 3 hours fixing before I can add my feature'. Then you end up with merge meetings and very weird things happening.
Usually missing source control in an older org means there is a large swath of tech debt. Watch for the weeds. You will find other things very quickly.
I never understood this thinking of "I don't need a source repo". As soon as I learned about RCS, I started to used it for all of my code. Why? So I can easily diff my changes and review history.
... And take more liberties in editing and trying out new codes!
Aren't you making the exact same mistake with AI? What has been the worst problem caused by AI so far?
AI does not know friend from foe. Iranian schoolgirls were killed by assumably an AI-directed decision. In games, there is an undo button. For those piloting killer drones having grown up in a nintendo world, one of the first things they are taught is there is no undo.
It's not like targeting mistakes have not been made in the past. Also, we don't know how many civilian casualties AI has avoided, we only know the ones it caused.
We are not comparing AI to humans. We are referring to irresponsible programming and uses. AI is an irreproducible wildcard. You don’t use something like that in any mission critical environment.
Computers have skyrocketed in price, data center related equipment is impossible to get and ludicrously expensive and AI slop has infested almost everything I see online.
And then there are the safety issues.
Famously it already broke out of containment many times and used exploits to illegally access and manipulate remote systems. Is this not enough for you? The fact that the target of the attack wasn't critical infrastructure is only a matter of circumstance.
is there any reasonable reason to still have the cryptic metar information sent to planes?
> I get the idea that the current administration is pushing safety to the side
Can you provide any examples you've come across where the current administration has pushed safety to the side with respect to the FAA? I'm curious to read about those. I know there have been some changes to regulations and there are sometimes disagreements around those but I'm not sure if the ones I've seen (which aren't comprehensive) would be considered pushing safety to the side.
It's not a serious statement. It's just something that people feel the need to add to their posts on certain message boards, including HN. The biggest tell is they never EVER mention President Trump by name or even the less specific "Trump administration". It is always "the current administration". You'll see it here dozens of times a week, that exact same phrase from a multitude of posters using it in the same way. You'll never get a good faith answer to your question because the statement itself was made for performative reasons and not for fostering serious discussion. Now that you know, you'll be surprised how much that exact phrase "the current administration" is used in this manner, not just here, but on public message boards across the internet.
100% agree. Well said. They also rarely/never provide any concrete evidence to support their claim.
I did! I mean it was there when you replied, but it's there. Maybe you missed it, but wanted to make sure you knew someone did so you don't have to have that false belief anymore.
Do they still have those 68030 Apollo's ?
in your opinion, what would be the most intellectually honest comparison? aviation in Europe or China? it would seem that a lot of shortages / pressures are artificial, in the sense that they are created purposefully by a political process.
we can look at this more holistically than a specific IT project. like in china, which is not a place i want to live, it is still valid to say, their process of steamrolling past local interests means that airport expansion and transit to new airports can be built quickly, which helps meet demand for air travel better than working at the absolute limits of safety and efficiency tradeoffs.
local control in the US infests everything. it causes airports to be too small, guilds to grow too slowly, it opposes infrastructure, it makes politicians too vulnerable and too weak to make changes that upset minor but powerful real estate interests.
so in one POV, safety is a blocker to reasonable change, but everywhere else in the world, they just increase capacity, and the huge stresses on safety limits are reduced.
> $12.5 billion to fix the aging US air traffic control system and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants another $30 billion for additional upgrades as the FAA deals with numerous technology issues.
Why does it cost this much? wouldn't any modern consumer grade computer be able to handle these tasks?
Using numbers I think sound big and ridiculous, I don’t see how you spend more than $1m/per airport x ~500 commercial airports for compute and work stations, maybe another, $2m per airport for cable runs, radars and radios, and the like, and maybe ~$1b on software development (it’s the government) that’s $2.5b rounded up $3b I can’t fathom $42.5b
And when the modern consumer grade computer fails in the middle of a busy shift?
More information needed. Was this a sneakernet? No one thought of replacing with a floppy emulator and SD cards? All of the data can fit into 1.44MB?
If the last one is true, devs take note. If FAA can rely on slow, small storage for safety critical applications, you probably can reduce the resource requirements for your app and improve your customers’ experience and extend the life of their hardware.
> devs take note
There’s been an incredible expansion of computer hardware and networking in every dimension since the heyday of the floppy. And the floppy itself was a huge step up from technology of even a few years prior.
Your comment could have been made in any year since 1950, and it would have been both correct and irrelevant outside the areas most resistant to hardware upgrades. FAA is conservative, and should be, but the rest of us have supercomputers in our pockets.
Have software developers abused the hardware capabilities they have been granted? Of course they have. I’d love to see some care put into that. But beyond the basics, hand-twiddled hyperoptimizations are now an exercise for craftspeople. Or…AI?
> but the rest of us have supercomputers in our pockets.
The issue is they don't feel like supercomputers, because of how much they've been taken for granted.
My computer and phone today feel no faster or better to use than they did 20 years ago. They might be vastly more capable for niche applications, but for the day-to-day stuff it seems like we keep buying new hardware, so we can run the latest software at the same old speeds, mostly for security updates.
I have an M1 MBP... a bit old, but still does everything I need. When I click Calendar in the dock (when it is already open, but just haven't used it in a while), it can take 3-5 seconds to come to the front as the active app. It feels broken. This wait wasn't a thing 5 years ago on this hardware, nor was it an issue on a PPC Mac from 25 years ago. Yet now its' a problem... why? So the UI can calculate the refraction of the background image in the liquid glass? Should I be spending $2,500 on a new MBP just to switch more quickly from my browser to the Calendar? It doesn't make much sense.
You put it so much better than I could have. It's as though software bloat is just destined to run slightly higher than Moore's Law. A Mac SE/30 with a spinning hard drive, a PowerBook G4 (also with a HDD), a 7th Gen Intel PC, an M1 Mac. All of them can open a basic app like Calendar in... 3-5 seconds. Even with nothing else running. Yet each one in that list is orders of magnitude more powerful than the previous by every measure.
s/destined/designed
According to this article, it's far worse than that: eight inch floppy disks! Capacity might be as much as 1.2MB per disk, but probably less. https://simpleflying.com/americas-atc-floppy-disks-12-billio...
Aha so that answers my question about why they haven't at least switched to USB thumb drives for their sneakernet. These aren't PCs. Probably minicomputers such as a TI-990 or similar. They don't have USB ports.
That said the 3.5" drives were actually electrically compatible with the double density 8" SA-800 drives.
If anyone wants to see the guts of an 8-inch drive and how complex it is check out this video from Adrian's Digital Basement.
https://youtu.be/hQY0DI7nKaM
Anyone who's worked around systems in that category knows that the fact that they're replacing floppies is more scary than the fact that they're still using floppies.
Yes, the system is old and warty, but we know it. It's old Jim the warthog.
I thought humanity had stopped manufacturing floppy disks.
But yes, the dread of the inevitable bug filled replacement for Jim the Warthog is very real.
It could be the domino effect of the Japanese gov phasing them out ;)
The politically grandstanding is gross. From what I can tell E-IDS has been in development since at least 2020 with a planned rollout starting in 2025.
Unfortunately web search has gotten so bad that it's hard to find past information about it.
Yeah, AI has become the only source of information that once could be gotten with Google. For example, this FAA document: https://www.faa.gov/media/70881 which I found through chat gpt. When this well is poisoned too, not sure where things are going.
FAA website on EIDS: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/eids
Another article with some more details: https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-faa-is-still-using-floppy-dis...
I know they are saying IDS-4 is a "1980s" system, but it appears IDS-4 was actually developed in the early 1990s; it uses MS-DOS and 3.5 inch floppies: https://sysatl.com/systems-atlanta-inc-awarded-faa-ids4-sust...
Remember, this is the government we're talking about. That system was likely being worked on from 1980s to 1990s before itactually went in to implementation phase in 1990s.
Kind of makes sense for the time given hardware was evolving so rapidly after Apple and MS brought PCs to the masses; a solution deployed in 1980 was out of date by 1981.
Workers of the day were used to paper first routines; PCs on every desk were not common until the 90s when home computers, like phones in 2026, hit a fast enough for most tasks in an office constant upgrades are not necessary.
There was a lot of ducks to align back then.
I feel like people under a certain age don't really understand this.
While we see improvements in hardware and software today, it's NOTHING like the late 80's and 90's. Our first home pc was out of date in less than a year (thank you for that recommendation, Tiger Direct). As a child, I couldn't run games that came out more than about 10-12 months after we upgraded our machine. It really was stunning to be a part of.
And now my home pc is about 4 years old, and replaced a machine that was 9. I plan to run this one for at least another 6 or 7 years unless something amazing happens that nobody sees coming.
If you didn't upgrade often, it could happen that you bought a new machine that was 10x as fast as the old one. It was just incredible how fast everything was after such an upgrade. A 486-66 to a Celeron-416 (common overclock at the time) in my case. The 486-66 was a year or two old for me - I had fished board and CPU out of the trash somewhere because before that I had a 486-33 bought in '94.
Tiger Direct, wow that's a blast from the past!
I tried at least 5 different times to buy from them out of computer shopper. Never actually managed it. For me, every time, 'out of stock'.
I have absolutely no understanding of ATC systems, though I would’ve thought that having a well established and (I would assume at this point) robust process of using a somewhat ancient media would reduce the attack vector of anything malicious finding its way into ATC systems.
I would love to know how often floppies are used day to day in ATC to warrant this?
> replacing outdated floppy disks that contain vital weather and other critical information with a streamlined, 21st-century system
What does this even… mean?
Memory spheres
zip disks.
That ungoldly click of death...
¡much confidence. fly yes!
https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2026-04/M...
https://sysatl.com/ids4/
An DOT Inspector General progress report from 2024:
https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/library-items/FA...
Twin towers spotted
Micro-services with docker running out of a kubernetes compliant blockchain with somewhere some "AI" added in the mix. I guess this news is more for PR than anything else because I don't see how the replacement of 69% of copper wire is meaningful in any way. What copper wires? Where? Is it because you removed landlines and replaced with voip?
Probably something something fiber optic
Going to 5” floppies, must have more space /s
At the very least, physical media is airgapped. Floppies still aren't a good choice though, since they develop bad sectors so easily.
Do they? or is it low quality media? Rather than judging old tech bad, new tech good we should look at the requirements and tradeoffs. The failure modes of the new replacement system look more catastrophic to me, relying on cloud infra and internet links.
I can't find information about how the disks are used specifically, how often they are read, written, what data they are used for, if they can be replaced by floppy emulators, etc.
12 billion for a new system that might not actually be an improvement is a lot of money.
I was told some 30 years ago that floppy disks only last for a couple of years
I have some 3.5" floppy disks in the bench seat of the electric organ that came with my house that are at least that old... the three I tried worked without issue. Small sample size, but it suggests a half-life way over a couple of years; I can't imagine this system has unusually robust error correction or anything.
I recently tried to copy over an old box of floppies from the 80s and 90s. I'd say 80-90% success rate.
Floppies aren't a bad technology, but they do have limits.
I doubt that SD cards will last that long.
> they develop bad sectors so easily
I never had a bad sector on 5.25-inch Double-sided, Double-Density (360K) diskettes, but I did all the time with 3.5-inch HD ones (1.44MB). I'm seeing some references to 8-inch and some to 3.5-inch disks used in the FAA, but I'm not sure what source has reliable information about that.
I've had some bad sectors on a high-desnity 5.25 floppy go away after blowing dust off.
there's no such thing as air gapping when people are involved.
The weather records have to be written to the floppy from an online device at some point in the pipeline.
The workflow has likely been compromised at some time, but due to lack of data integrity checks, it was never detected.
You've found the positive side to the fact that our government with budgets for all the money in the world can't seem to stay within 30 years of up to date technically.
If we give them more money, this is sure to improve! Monopolies and all ...
The problem is, with what media would you replace them with if you had to replace them somewhere between then and now? iomega zip drives? Jaz drives? CF cards? sony memory sticks? rewritable cds/dvds? Imation superdisks?
They could've replaced floppies multiple times, with all the certifications and hardware replacements and new procedures and regulations, and we'd still be using (a different, but still) "obsolete" medium for this now.
Agree. For a purpose-built system that is only used by trained professionals, being "up to date" really means nothing. There's only fitness for purpose.
But the cost of switching -- mainly thoroughly certifying the replacement system, retraining, and the risks of an error happening during one of those processes causing a catastrophe -- that's real.
There's no point in upgrading the storage mechanisms of arbitrary systems, or completely redoing the whole system from scratch on new hardware which would be the case here, unless it yields measurable improvements in fitness for purpose to balance against the switching costs.
When I was 10 years old, way back in 1980, I got my first 5.25" diskette from the salesman of a COMPUTER AGE shop. He got tired of watching me type in the same old BASIC listings after school and spared me the damage of it by giving me the diskette, on the provision that I let other customers use the demo APPLE II's.
Sitting here now in 2026 I have a box containing almost 3000 3.5" FHD floppy disks.
Each about 1.544 Megabytes, unless you cut the notch.
I literally dumpster dived this resource after being invited in to do so at a local electronics shop closure, some years ago now, on the proviso that I did not leave empty handed.
There are about 12 devices in my living room that can use these things, but I'll never use more than 30.
Some day, I'll see the last one go. That'll be weird.
Typing in the code from a listing is one way I inadvertently learned to program.
Same. Over and over again. Every time, learning new things. And then trying to port things from one system to another is how I became a disciplined cross-platform systems software developer. And then, when C was kind of new, I bought a compiler instead of drugs and booze, like my peers at the time. Oh, what a world that has wrought!
> Some day, I'll see the last one go.
Equally likely: they'll see YOU go. Pape... uhm I mean floppies are patient.
> The country's air traffic facilities cannot talk to one another and operate on individual analog computers.
I assume they just mean _old_ computers here. Unless they have some specialized analog air traffic computers? That would be pretty cool.
>The FAA cited an October 13 event where a fiber optic cable connecting Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport to the FAA’s network was cut outside an airport gate, leading to the loss of data services between FAA facilities and requiring a ground stop.
Do they seriously not have a backup connection? I would have expected them to have a backup stelite or maybe even a 4G/5G mobile data system in place.
If I can use my phone as a Hotspot when Comcast is doing some service so I can work, I don't understand what idiot designed an airport without backup connections.
> Do they seriously not have a backup connection?
That was the backup connection. The primary failed, and concurrently the backup had been severed by a construction crew.
If you don't regularly test your backup, you don't have a backup.
If you are curious: one of the most frequent problems that disables fire sprinklers is maintenance forgetting to turn the water back on. No one notices until it is too late.
No one notices the thousands of times the redundant links works just fine. We only notice when the primary has an outage and a construction crew cuts a fiber line at the same time.
If you’re relying on your redundant link thousands of times you probably need a third link.
Useful aphorism in general, not terribly applicable in this case. Even if it had been tested regularly, it was cut around the same time the primary failed. Regular testing doesn't stop construction crews from cutting a line.
A more useful comment might have been to say something about the depth of the backup, having only one backup connection not being enough or something.
The primary was being inspected and the secondary failed, there were redundant systems.
> I don't understand what idiot designed an airport without backup connections.
I have literally spraypainted the pavement and wall - "One fibre goes here, and down on the corner there, the other fibre goes there" - just to ensure a good separation of routes. I want the pinch point to be within the rack that the routers sit in.
I don't get why an airport can't do similar.
That airport did have two redundant connections, this was a swiss cheese failure where one was under maintenance and the other was severed by an independent event.
> one was under maintenance
So they didnt have a redundant connection. They had 1 live one that was severed.
they did... it was just singly redundant. they would need double redundancy here. so 3 connections, not 2
Taking one connection out for maintenance and leaving only 1 live connection is not redundancy, it is a failed backup.
Redundancy is always having more than one live connection.
I’m surprised that they still find floppies to use considering the youngest floppy is now going to high school
I was in a tower last year. They were sequencing aircraft with little loops of paper placed onto a wooden dowel. It can and should be better. Doesn't need to be whiz-bang, but it should not be paper slips and wooden sticks. (and floppy disks)
Paper flight progress strips [1] have famously resisted replacement, even though they keep trying [2].
Every 5 years or so, a different publication will write an in-depth story about how difficult they are to replace, because nothing works nearly as well, and the controllers go back to using paper every time a new system is trialed. I think I've even read about them in a cognitive psychology textbook at uni.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_progress_strip
[2] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/tfdm/efs
That is really not the worst thing about ATC. Far from it.
I have heard experienced pilots lamenting that we're still using voice on a scratchy radio, with garbled audio and people accidentally talking over other transmissions both being constant problems, for essentially all vital comms.
While I have no problem with keeping that as a fallback, there's zero reason why we shouldn't have, at least for airliners that have two pilots, a text-based communication system. We can still convert the text to speech in the cockpit to keep awareness the same, but we could play overlapping transmissions one after the other. And think of the other advantages. People wouldn't get callsigns wrong, could be alerted specially when their callsign was being talked to...
It's complicated because we will need to cooperate with all countries, but it's not like we don't have ICAO to work within.
We already have some systems in place for this, specifically stuff like ACARS and CPDLC. I suspect the issue is in congested terminal airspace, though; if you have many aicraft talking to an approach controller it is not uncommon to have multiple transmissoins at the same time.
However, approach phases are exactly the same periods when the pilots probably shouldn't be looking at their FMCs and texting. Voice communication is faster, and so is acknowledgement of voice commands, while allowing the pilots to concentrate on more critical controls. For example, in many airports it is possible to get departure clearances and such via text, but take-off clearance and taxi instructions will still be voice over radio.
Does it still work when the power goes out? Is it easy to troubleshoot? Not everything needs to be overly-complicated.
They have backup power at the airport, and no, jetliners are not arriving and departing in the event of a power outage in the tower.
This is nearly the exact reason most 'smart home' systems fail eventually. They become very brittle after the hardware gets 'old'. Where as the dumb tech from the 1950s still 'just works' and costs 1/20th of the smart switch.
In that system you can tell what is going on by looking at in a glance and works with no power. Sometimes simple is a great answer.
However, I can think of one reason the 'no power' argument fails. They do a lot by radio. That needs power. Also you would need to retrain everyone. Oh and you probably would get locked into one company that wants to control the whole software stack and sell tons of support.
I have a friend who is a real estate agent for the wealthy. He laughs at the people who automate their homes. The automation inevitably fails, the vendor has disappeared, and the owner is faced with ripping all the wiring out of the walls and replacing it. Usually it gets replaced with conventional wiring.
When my home was built in 1999, I poured over all the home automation systems. I opted for conventional wiring. But I did wire every room (myself) with cat5 cable and RG6 coax, in a star configuration. It has served me very well, no problems at all.
I don't use the RG6 anymore, as my TV service comes over the intertoobs now. The cat5 isn't supposed to work with gigabit equipment, but it works fine. Wifi has improved by leaps and bounds, but I still rely on hardwired ethernet, as it is stupid reliable.
> I did wire every room (myself) with cat5 cable and RG6 coax
I think the best idea is to install conduit as the house is built, so that outdated wires can be replaced with newer wires by just tying the end of the old wire to the end of the new wire and pulling.
Just be sure to inspect the house as it is being built, because I think one user on HN wrote that conduit was required by law, but when he went to swap the wires, he couldn't pull them - he discovered there was only pipe in the visible terminations, not the whole route.
So my mother worked at a bank when she was in college. This is the 70s. Later in life she went back to work, in the 90s, at a bank. When the computers went down and they had to close the books on paper and she was the only one that knew how to do it.
There is something to be said for knowing how to deal with critical systems when the automation breaks.
My grandpa used to be a manual typesetter in the newspaper industry and retired in the 80s.
A few decades later, similar story, he came back to work part time, when desktop publishing was all the rage.
Welp, of course the computers went down.
So they fired up the old hot metal typesetting machines and he manually set all 100,000 words of that Newspaper by hand, and then they went to print using 19th century steam powered print lines.
Except, that story is total bullshit that I made up. Because "the computer went down" is something we can mitigate much easier than doing everything by hand.
Sometimes the old technology actually is objectively worse, inefficient, and obsolete. Like floppy disks, or manually having humans close the books at a bank.
Better in what way? They have avoided replacement specifically because they work extremely well and none of the alternatives have been demonstrably better.
Those things actually work great, not everything has to be modernized for modernization sake... that's how we get cars with touchscreens instead of buttons and knobs.
a mechanical (wood, paper , etc) state machine is very resilient and easy to read even from across the room. No electricity demands, no lighting needed. Contains it's own mutual-exclusion (only one person can modify it at any time).
the digital version would require 10+ endpoints with 1000x points of failure.
To be fair light does help with reading paper
I'm not sure I've ever laughed at a headline from a Hacker News post before.
I'd like to have some old computer accessories in home office.
The problem is the beige plastic cases have all turned into the color of bile.
Is it the last of the truly air-gapped federal agencies?
No. DOD still has a lot of air-gapped systems, some for legitimate reasons, and many out of momentum or lack of understanding of how networks work.
These are not serious people.
If it aint broke don't fix it
This is a headline from 1996?
Welcome to the 2000s. ETA: 2028.
wow never thought i would outlast them
I just hope they are not replacing the system with Claude
... and make it safe
I'm more interested with the data integrity protections before the data got onto the floppy, and why those protocols (e.g. signature verification) couldn't be completed via email at the endpoint.
Replacing the drives with FlashFloppy would not be a crazy idea as a first step.
You're going to run that on a computer from the late 1980s or early 1990s? And how do you get the data onto those computers when they're not connected to a network, or the same network, as your other systems?
Can we phase out pennies instead?
I don't want the FAA to make changes at "lightning speed" or "rapidly moving to make upgrades" or "record pace". Safety must be further down the list for these guys.
Using outdated computer systems with aging storage media is a safety issue.
No, it isn't. This is time tested process. Find me any flight that had to land or crashed because the floppy disk was broken.
I've worked on systems this decade that still relied on floppy disks. It's getting harder and harder for them to operate because the disks are getting rarer, as are the drives. And often the essential component is not the disk itself. There are some other computers in the system that cannot be upgraded to any more recent device, systems from the 1980s and 1990s that force them to continue using a floppy disk.
If it was just two modern computers and transferring data between them, the floppy disk would have been dropped in a heartbeat. But it's the old computers still in the critical path that are holding everything back. And those are really hard to maintain. Last year we phased out a system that was dependent on computers from the mid-1990s, getting replacement parts was practically impossible, they mostly just don't exist. You'd buy old systems off ebay and hope that they had enough working parts to scavenge, and the right working parts.
EDIT: Light editing because I had some extra words.
Old habits die hard.
There was a time when the company I was working for was selling service contracts for DEC TZ30 tape drives to DEC itself because their own internal service organization was unwilling or unable to support them.
The application was software distribution, most likely to customers they were contractually obligated to support, and no newer drives were able to write the required tape format, so upgrading to newer drives wasn't an option.
Systems are dynamic, not static. There are secondary consequences and forgotten/ignored opportunity costs. Sure, the existing system has proven workarounds, though labor and attention intensive. When a floppy disk fails it won't directly create disaster. But these legacy requirements do block the more cohesive and thorough introduction of additional safety mechanisms that increase redundancy and reduce the scope of possible human error - such as new sensor hardware and their automation, latency improvements, and information synthesis/notification clarity.
Here's a software analogy - required support for very old OS versions often interferes with the scope, simplicity, and security of new feature work, and even if the work is still feasible at that point it is slowed down greatly, eating up attention and time that could go towards addressing other important issues. That accumulates over time, and cumulative loss of improvements that could have otherwise been made has a real effect in unprevented disasters and wasted controller availability.
It's both time tested and at risk of ripping at the seams. Floppy disks and the mechanisms still wear. And because neither are still made, the chances of a zero population scenario happening is greater every year.
It's better to test a replacement while you still have the time, than to risk rushing something else.
The overall reliability of a system is time invariant... its either reliable, or not.
The fact that it has gone x days without an incident doesnt upgrade or downgrade its reliability. The engineering and processes are function in an equation that calculates mean time to failure. Life-critical processes have numbers placed to this... like a failure every 50 years or 100 years... or 100000 years, and you work towards solving that.
Floppy disks aren't manufactured anymore. At some point there aren't going to be any.
Replacing them with cloud-based systems (if this is the "streamlined, 21st-century system") is a safety issue as well. I hope they are not.
Fortunately the choice isn't between 1980s hardware with floppy disk requirements and rented servers in someone else's building. There are a lot of options in between those two.
Yeah but none of those in-between options gets the c-suite massive bonuses because the margins aren't as large so they rarely ever do it.
Just turn WinRAR error correction up to max /s
They should use rust instead of floppy disks
It makes me wonder: what gov't agency is still using punch cards.
> “We’re moving away from outdated, manual processes and replacing technology that once relied on floppy disks with a modern system that allows controllers to instantly share critical flight alerts, restricted airspace schedules and pilot reports,"
So they make their systems run on the internet now?
What could possibly go wrong?
In my carreer I have seen plenty of system integrations working on ftp'ing request response documents to file folders on "SaaS" systems while the SV boys were considering SOAP obsolete and overnight Cobol and RPG mainframes document sincs while they were waxing about microservises and noSQL.
I love the idea that the headline suggest that Sean Duffy and his family at the completion of their multi-month road trip going on another one.
This one, where the tour stops are ATC data buildings, where they only stop in to swap out floppy disks for USB drives.
The folks over at The Onion are kicking themselves right now because they didn't think of this headline first.
arent they supposed to phase out punchcard computers first?
> The greatest nation in the world deserves a state-of-the-art air traffic control system, and under President Trump, we’re delivering just that
They are signalling Trumps involvement so I will assume it must be another vanity project he wants to stamp his name on. I look forward to hundreds of grounded planes due to cloud based weather reporting not being available because of a borked server update or misconfigured wifi adapter.
> You can track the progress of the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS) by state and airport on our Modern Skies website.
Another trump tell… Lame acronym.
Initialism. If this were the neocon era it'd be an awkward shoehorned acronym like SKYHAWK or something though.
They'll just switch to gold floppies
Next they will be migrating off Internet Explorer 6
great thing to read before a flight
hopefully not with pendrives
Zip Disks are the future. click click
I have heard of exploits that can root a machine from inserting a USB device (in fact, this has been used by attackers to conspicuously leave thumb drives in the parking lots of organizations they want to attack).
I have never heard of a sploit that roots your machine from inserting a floppy.
floppy boot sector viruses were common back in the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_(computer_virus) I had one infect my home pc called ripper
true, there were viruses, and they came over floppy. but USB has a hidden firmware layer. I remember one on Apple a few years ago they said is completely un-patchable because it affected the firmware on the USB chip itself. I dont remember what happened after that, though.
why is this "historic"? the thirst for this admin to use the most bombastic language possible is so tiring.
Just... modernize the thing already. thats your job. It's not impressive that you did this. You're supposed to do this. You dont get extra kudos for doing the thing you signed up to do...
and dont forget to put Trump's name at the beginning. Or he might get cranky
Everything they try to spin positively has to be 'historic' because:
1. The party leader is a fragile, dying narcissist who is desperate for his name to be attached to anything other than the misery he's inflicted upon the world.
2. Their _actual_ historic achievements are all war crimes, human rights violations, and policy changes that would terrify their average supporter if they actually understood the long-term consequences.
It’s historic because no else has done it in the last 40+ years. Doesn’t make it a big deal, but it’s still a big change.
It is a big deal if you fly :)
The inability to keep the air traffic control system effective and maintainable is far more embarrassing than the inability to update the IRS software or build a high-speed rail.
You could call it histrionic.
What is this, a joke‽
alt link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/us-faa-says-phase-flo...
I have a bad feeling that this is not going to end well. Especially given that this administration is... Rather incompetent. I hope that safety is like number one on their list of priorities but somehow I doubt it
I would rather things be done "incompetently" than nothing being done at all.
> I would rather things be done "incompetently" than nothing being done at all.
Engineers of today aren't better than engineers of yesterday, they just have access to new technology (and new footguns).
I'd rather have a well-designed legacy system that does the job well, than an incompetently designed "modernized" system that doesn't.
> Engineers of today aren't better than engineers of yesterday
Our ability to wield technology has gone up, while our ability to engineer and understand that technology (as a whole) has gone down.
Age should be the most suspect of arguments against the design of a system. Enumerate specifically its flaws and not just that it is old. System design doesn't wear out, it is abstract, like mathematics.
Every time I'm in a place of business with shiny computers, I'm reminded of the difference in efficiency between the newest systems and the 'green screen' terminals and other similar tech that was everywhere in 1990.
Most of those were extremely optimized for their specific purposes - for instance, screens were carefully designed to fit all the necessary information to complete a task without any scrolling. They had extremely low latency despite all the hardware being potato-grade compared to what we have today.
When latency existed, simple things like the keyboard buffer allowed the skilled user to get ahead of the machine and move onto another task, while the processing caught up.
Today, it's all a webapp with a ton of React, probably 5,000 npm modules, and you get to watch skeletal loading rectangles pulsating after every click (or branded animations on the "customer-facing" flavor). Instead of having muscle memory of hands on a keyboard (usually a specialized one which gave a dedicated key to every important function), the user must move their arm to find touch targets placed at arbitrary places across a 24" touchscreen, and often hunting for functions inside ••• menus.
Obviously, no usability testing has been done on any of these. Or if it has, the only thing tested was "Can a 17-year-old with zero skills ploddingly complete a transaction (the happy path only!), after only 15 minutes of training?"
So yeah, I never listen to any "newer = better" takes.
I worked on a lot of those "green screen" (or "orange screen") apps.
Limited to keyboard and 24x80 screen, but yes, the apps were lean & responsive -- sub-second response time, and keyboard muscle memory. And some shops I worked in capped your DB calls to <25 per transaction. In stark contrast to some of the Laravel apps I've worked in recent years where the SQL logs showed me 300-400+ DB calls on a given request :(
Your comment reads like poetry.
I don't. Incompetence costs lives. Using old tech that has worked for decades costs a couple dollars extra to maintain for a system worth millions.
You can justify any waste with that argument. Saying things will cost lives is just a way to interject bureaucracy to slow down a project. You are the enemy of progress even if you don't realize it.
An enemy of progress for not wanting some halfbaked replacement for tech that has worked for decades? Yeah okay.
If it ain't broke, don't "fix" it.
Why? Do you want more people to die? The only way to migrate a system like this safely is to do it competently and slowly.
Yes it's a risk I'm willing to take. But because of redundancy it will be 0.
Nothing being done at all means the system continues working as it is. Something being done incompetently means more people die.
You need to be willing to take risks or nothing will get done. It's okay to accept that people will die. People die every second of every day.
“Willing to take risks” does not imply “let incompetent buffoons manage a major change to air traffic control.”
what an absolutely awful take.
And what an absolutely awful summarization of your argument. The take of let's not change anything ever and trust the process won't work long term.
I find the frequent comments like this honestly bizarre, they act like the entire civil service turns over every 4 years.
Far from it. I know for a fact the civil service (normally) doesn't change per administration. But the key word is "normally". Pretty much nothing this administration has done is normal. Do you really expect most of the people involved in this transition to know what they're doing, given that many of them are yes-men?
I agree, nothing says poor priorities like upgrading the air traffic control system. It removes the opportunity for graft, only supports the monied elite who can afford to fly and don't care about climate change, and diminishes the opportunities for crises to exploit.
Instead, the United States government should have continued the policies and values that led to Next Gen, ERAM, STARS, and AAS.
what do you mean. a lot of poor people fly as well. I won't would even risk to say that poor people fly more often. For example migrant workers flying lets say Bulgaria-Ireland every few months
I think what readthenotes1 is trying to say is what I was hinting at in my comment: this administration cannot be trusted to do this properly or in the service of actually making the ATC system better. They're instead doing it because the 1% says that modern == better (which for a safety-critical system is usually not actually true). The proper thing this administration should be doing is to do this as a failover at first but keep the existing ATC system running until the new system is just as safe and as capable as the original, but I get the feeling they won't do that.
Out with FDD, in with GPT! (!)