> This is the most important infrastructure project that we’ve had in this country for decades. Everyone agrees — this is non-partisan. Everyone knows we have to do it.
Considering the current political climate and rampant government cuts to important services, I very much doubt “everyone agrees” and that this is the best time to be planning such an important transition.
Yeah, couldn't this easily split in a group supporting the FAA to implement a better system, versus a group trying to contract it out to the private sector? Before you know it, IBM* is printing money again. (* substitute with Evil Corp of your choosing)
"Everyone agrees - this is non-partisan" is itself a piece of rhetoric designed to create that reality in a situation where it's in doubt. If everyone actually agreed you wouldn't need to emphasize it.
Operating systems have gotten a whole lot more reliable since Windows 95. The way I remember it, Windows 98 would regularly corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled. I'd done it so many times that I could pretty much recite the license key from memory. Modern Linux is rock solid. Even Windows 10 is very stable. They might be 'bloated', but modern OS's are way, way more stable.
As the article points out: the hardware is at risk of physically failing and it’s getting harder to replace like for like. That’s the reason for looking at an upgrade. Hell, even turning the machines off to replace them is a challenge since some systems need to run 24/7!
I read some years ago - IIRC the letters pages of BYTE, which dates it - about a critical factory control system in a company somewhere running on an IBM XT. The MFM drive had started to show some errors, so they got in touch with IBM, who being IBM, did not have any drives in stock (they'd stopped making them 15 years previously), but could retool a manufacturing line and make some. They offered to do it for $250k/drive. The company paid up.
That was cheaper at that time, than modernising that system. But it's clearly not long-term scalable.
I've heard of S/360s in KTLO mode in basements keeping banks running. Teams of people slowly crafting COBOL to get new features in at a cost of thousand of dollars a day each, and it "still works". But from a risk point of view, this is also ridiculous.
Safety critical systems have different economics. Yes, you can keep the floppy systems going, but the cost of keeping them going is rising exponentially each year, and at some point a failure will cost one or more airliners full of civilians and the blame will be put on not having a reasonable upgrade policy.
Sometimes you have to fix things before they stop working, or the cost is not just eyewateringly expensive in terms of dollars, but of human lives too.
Let's be a little more reasonable. I don't think anyone is saying we need AI. There are numerous other technological advances between floppy drives and AI that our air traffic control system could benefit.
Does it work? Sure. You have to ask more questions. How much does it cost to keep it working? How much would it cost to upgrade? If we do nothing, along what sort of timeline can we expect it to stop working, or become cost prohibitive to maintain?
The article completed skipped over this. This video was released literally a week ago and is completely mocking the FAA. Floppy disks are a big joke in this video.
For retrofit purposes, it's probably attainable to use solid state (no moving parts) floppy disk emulators that use USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards instead of error-prone, real floppy disks. Every time a floppy drive moves over a sector to read or write, it wears that area mechanically. Magnetically, bits just seem to rot from floppy disks randomly with time more likely failure mode for previously good floppies.
Let me complain you about how error-prone and unreliable are real floppy disks. ):
> For retrofit purposes, it's probably attainable to use solid state (no moving parts) floppy disk emulators that use USB thumb drives or CF/SD cards instead of error-prone, real floppy disks.
Yes, but if it is just a PC running Windows 95, likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, or if worst comes to worst, keep Windows 95 and stick it in a VM. I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else.
The use case where physical floppy emulators really shine is with much more exotic legacy systems. Some years ago there was a furore that the US nuclear arsenal was still being managed using 8-inch floppy disks (used in IBM Series/1s, 16-bit minicomputers from the 1970s). USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, but I suspect they kept the Series/1 minicomputers and just replaced the 8-inch floppy drives with hardware emulators (which probably each cost an utter fortune when you add up the premiums anyone will charge for it being the military, being highly classified, and above all being related to glowing things that go boom)
Tomshardware could do better reporting. There is no such thing as a computer that can’t fail, or a component that can’t be replaced. Does our reporter think the entire system was installed 25 years ago, and not one component has been replaced since? More likely it’s the ship of Theseus, and not one component is original.
I’ve replaced whole systems without interruption. You build in compatibility, then replace every computer one by one, and phase out use of the compatibility. It’s not rocket surgery.
Technical sites could be superior to the reporting in the general media on technical issues. It doesn’t have to be be stenography.
I think they are just trying to get across how critical this infrastructure is, it can't be powered down for several days and unscheduled maintenance is risky.
The other problem they are up against is that there are not many people around that still understand how it works or what the edge cases are.
Upgrading these large distributed systems can be painful. The NHS tried to upgrade their software, over £10 bn later and they abandoned it [1].
Minor nit: There are classes of computers which contain redundant CPUs, PSUs, memory, etc where the components are hot swappable. Very specialized and expensive hardware which is statistically unlikely to ever need a reboot!
Source: My cousin used to sell these systems back in the 90's and 00's.
Aside from that, the upgrades to this critical infrastructure should be resistant to hacking and other vulnerabilities
They should realise that, unlike e.g. USB drives or SSDs or even HDDs[1], floppy disks are dumb raw media and cannot contain any "hidden" behaviour, and the failure modes are well-known.
As of the early 2000s, ATC was still using vacuum tubes. In fact, the FAA was the single biggest buyer of vacuum tubes in the world at the time, almost all of them sourced from former Soviet bloc countries. I think they've all been replaced by now, but I can't say that with 100% certainty.
Which is what baffles me about the current situation and gives me a lot of hope for this effort. We should've been updating this stuff in the 90s, but successive administrations of both parties have just passed the ball on this one.
What I don’t understand in such reports is why there is no mention at all how this is done in other countries. Do they all still use floppy disks? Did they do an upgrade? How did it go? Surely this would be valuable information.
A considerable number of countries use systems based on ex-Eurocat now TopSky, for their air traffic controllers, which is a distributed system.
Install and updates are via a registry based system, and it supports Windows, Linux, macOS - because its mostly written in Ada and R, as of 2012. (Most are running on top of Linux, as far as I'm aware).
I get that FAA hardware/software is a time-tested, safety-critical system that has resisted many prior modernization efforts but...how do other countries run their systems? Surely they're not all using floppies. I doubt there are many (any?) countries with a flight volume like the US but overall, flight safety is pretty good world-wide (again, with exceptions).
Their governments fund the upgrades instead of running around claiming their flight agencies are full of corruption and inefficiency with no basis in reality.
I remember reading a drone startup saying they had an easier time operating in Kenya than in the US because Kenya's ATC system was fully modernized, with every aircraft tracked at all times.
What non-pilot techies fail to comprehend is that the entire ATC system is designed to operate in a no-communication failure mode. This includes features such as the paper strips, mandatory holding points, timed approaches, clearance void times, etc. It is all designed so if you have a complete communication failure in IFR conditions you can land without hitting anyone else.
Any fancy new system of, for example an in-cockpit text based clearance/routing display using an LTE network, will need to be backed up with a process that can be accomplished with a pencil, a compass, and silence.
For anyone considering doing development in this space, sign up for a 20 hour instrument flying ground school, preferably one taught by a retired old fart rather than a 25 year old “instructor” with no actual experience.
A first step to mitigate some of the risk would be to move the
system to a virtualised system. This could be in each location
or more centralised which would make the maintenance of the
fleet of old computers easier.
Floppy can be copied to hard disks and will not have to worry
about failures of mechanical parts involved in reading floppy drives.
Developing a brand new system would take quit a lot of time.
As all systems du if they need extreme uptime.
Starting that effort now is ok but I would guess it would be take
at leas a couple of years. Significant work would have to understand
in detail what the current system does and does not do, and then
map out what a system should do.
We IT folks tend to quickly propose solutions to systems whose complexities we do not completely understand. That's fine when it is about serving ads or managing book orders. It's not ok when the stakes are high.
Virtualization just adds another layer of complexity to an already fragile system which literally thousands of human lives depend on every day. Adding more complexity is not a neutral act here, but neglectful manslaughter waiting to happen. Aviation is a low-tech, never-touch-a-running-system, risk-averse environment for a reason.
Floppies were useful because you could easily take them and take them to another, secondary, sometimes air gapped backup system. Replacing this functionality means replicating not just the data transfer, but also the safety architecture - which includes physical isolation and manual fallback paths. To recreate, the best chance would probably be something like storing the relevant info on thumb drives - but then you have whole new family of attack vectors by hostile forces (anyone still remember Stuxnet), which floppies did not have in that form?
And then there's the pesky aspect of international interoperability. One country alone cannot just storm forward. We are looking at decades of upgrades and alignments here. And that process already is underway. But proposing a radical change without acknowledging the full scope of what that entails - from certification cycles to human factors to geopolitical coordination - is not progress, it’s hubris.
I wonder if anyone makes a virtual floppy drive that replicates the performance characteristics. I.e. to avoid a faster virtual drive uncovering dormant race conditions. Something like a developer assuming "I have enough time to do this processing before the disc makes another rotation" etc.
What are the chances they ditch floppies on the hardware end and switch to GNU/Linux running DOSBox to preserve the software stack?
Presumably (hopefully) the existing system is airgapped in some way or otherwise restricted to communication with other ATC systems, so DOSBox-X running Win95/98[1] could act as a drop-in replacement for the software side...
While you can still get high quality floppy disks, there is nothing wrong with them. You must handle them properly and keep them clean, but that's only a problem for children and idiots. When demand falls and they are no longer profitable to manufacture at high quality levels, low quality media dominate the supply and you have problems.
I watched this happen with floppy media. When floppy disks were common in the 80's you had great quality disks from top tier Japanese manufacturers at low cost. Media failure was rare and you could rely on a disk day after day for years. Then, as demand for floppies dropped, and these manufacturers fobbed off legacy products to low cost manufacturers, floppy media became terrible.
By the mid to late 90's, floppy media bought retail was very unreliable. For a brief time I was salvaging stacks of disks that came with commercial software because the software vendors were still able to secure good media, while the retail blanks you found in stores was just this side of e-waste. I used them with expensive instruments that had integral (high quality) floppy drives, long after PCs stopped using them.
The problem, once Congress gets wind of the amount of real money that will need to be spent, plus the time it will really take to develop and fully test, it is cancelled.
Of course I fully expect this to be TIP (Test in Production), thus for maybe 10 years, flying in the US could be very dangerous. Lets hope the pilots will be able to manually avoid other planes.
He also pointed at the root cause and possible solution there. Which is re-categorizing spending on this as essential instead of as something that's nice to have and becomes the victim of cuts almost immediately after anytime some budget is actually allocated.
An interesting point here is maybe that there's a whole world outside the US where planes fly and communicate. For example the EU has its own issues on this front but is modernizing what it does. Airspaces here are pretty dense and busy. It's not necessary to reinvent a lot of wheels here. The US could just look across its borders and learn from what is being done there.
As soon as there's a reasonable budget for this, there are all sorts of perfectly reasonable things that can be done. The core issue isn't technical.
Would you like to trust your life win95 and floppies definitely no but paper strips is something really robust and in light of crowd-strike or the outage in Newark I think a truly independent backup ‚system‘ is a good idea. Particularly as the next system will come with some early bugs.
The reporting on this has been an atrocious, lazy, embarrassment to journalism (aka: a normal day) so I tried my best to look into it.
As far as I can tell the only systems that use floppy disks are IDS-4 terminals, of which there are a couple hundred left in the US, the rest having been upgraded (to IDS-5 or similar systems) over the last 30 years.
I don't know if it is small regional airports with no money, large international airports with few moments of downtime time needed for the upgrade, a mix those two, bad luck with the bureaucratic wheel-of-priorities spin, or what.
But there's no context to any of these articles, only "FLOPPY DRIVES LOL" so I had to take the time to find out what systems were actually impacted.
I mean, it could have been an old HP Oscilloscope in a RF rack that used floppy drives to store images and log data, or it could have been the Master Control Program of the entire air traffic control network.
There's a slight difference in impact between those two.
It appears as though there are multiple competitors/replacements to IDS-4 so the solution is to cut a check and block off some time on the calendar.
edit: every single journalist who just grabs a couple of tweets, adds some commentary, and dusts off their hands muttering "job well done" should encased in a Lucite cube and displayed in the town square as an object of ridicule.
The problem is all of the big software consultancy services are optimized to maximize revenues / minimize their own risk when working with big / dumb government agencies.
Still have yet to see any evidence of exactly how this tech is being used, just statements from an established liar with no qualifications and clear motives to sabotage the federal government so it can be taken over by private corporations.
It's possible that what is actually going is that the Windows 95 serves as "bootloader" for something like VxWorks - KUKA robots with KRC-1 controllers do something similar.
Setting a protocol to handle air traffic control and collision prevention in airspace around airports is a 100% automatable problem. You don't even need a centralized control system. This can be handled entirely with software running on each plane. Same way a flock of birds can fly and never collide with each other.
latexr|8 months ago
Considering the current political climate and rampant government cuts to important services, I very much doubt “everyone agrees” and that this is the best time to be planning such an important transition.
sverhagen|8 months ago
azernik|8 months ago
nradov|8 months ago
eviks|8 months ago
seattle_spring|8 months ago
Not to mention rampant anti-intellectualism
evanjrowley|8 months ago
I would trust a floppy-powered Windows 95 system over the horror show that passes for common operating systems in 2025.
What will they think of next? Adding AI to the ATC system?
ajxs|8 months ago
scott_w|8 months ago
As the article points out: the hardware is at risk of physically failing and it’s getting harder to replace like for like. That’s the reason for looking at an upgrade. Hell, even turning the machines off to replace them is a challenge since some systems need to run 24/7!
foobarchu|8 months ago
PaulRobinson|8 months ago
That was cheaper at that time, than modernising that system. But it's clearly not long-term scalable.
I've heard of S/360s in KTLO mode in basements keeping banks running. Teams of people slowly crafting COBOL to get new features in at a cost of thousand of dollars a day each, and it "still works". But from a risk point of view, this is also ridiculous.
Safety critical systems have different economics. Yes, you can keep the floppy systems going, but the cost of keeping them going is rising exponentially each year, and at some point a failure will cost one or more airliners full of civilians and the blame will be put on not having a reasonable upgrade policy.
Sometimes you have to fix things before they stop working, or the cost is not just eyewateringly expensive in terms of dollars, but of human lives too.
PapaPalpatine|8 months ago
paxys|8 months ago
CharlieDigital|8 months ago
rattlesnakedave|8 months ago
ninetyninenine|8 months ago
This whole thing is being done as a reaction to this video:
https://youtu.be/YeABJbvcJ_k?t=1540
The article completed skipped over this. This video was released literally a week ago and is completely mocking the FAA. Floppy disks are a big joke in this video.
stackedinserter|8 months ago
blitzar|8 months ago
burnt-resistor|8 months ago
Let me complain you about how error-prone and unreliable are real floppy disks. ):
skissane|8 months ago
Yes, but if it is just a PC running Windows 95, likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, or if worst comes to worst, keep Windows 95 and stick it in a VM. I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else.
The use case where physical floppy emulators really shine is with much more exotic legacy systems. Some years ago there was a furore that the US nuclear arsenal was still being managed using 8-inch floppy disks (used in IBM Series/1s, 16-bit minicomputers from the 1970s). USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, but I suspect they kept the Series/1 minicomputers and just replaced the 8-inch floppy drives with hardware emulators (which probably each cost an utter fortune when you add up the premiums anyone will charge for it being the military, being highly classified, and above all being related to glowing things that go boom)
jklowden|8 months ago
Tomshardware could do better reporting. There is no such thing as a computer that can’t fail, or a component that can’t be replaced. Does our reporter think the entire system was installed 25 years ago, and not one component has been replaced since? More likely it’s the ship of Theseus, and not one component is original.
I’ve replaced whole systems without interruption. You build in compatibility, then replace every computer one by one, and phase out use of the compatibility. It’s not rocket surgery.
Technical sites could be superior to the reporting in the general media on technical issues. It doesn’t have to be be stenography.
bArray|8 months ago
The other problem they are up against is that there are not many people around that still understand how it works or what the edge cases are.
Upgrading these large distributed systems can be painful. The NHS tried to upgrade their software, over £10 bn later and they abandoned it [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-...
metadat|8 months ago
Source: My cousin used to sell these systems back in the 90's and 00's.
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
userbinator|8 months ago
They should realise that, unlike e.g. USB drives or SSDs or even HDDs[1], floppy disks are dumb raw media and cannot contain any "hidden" behaviour, and the failure modes are well-known.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735424
XorNot|8 months ago
os2warpman|8 months ago
Look up floppy boot sector viruses.
DebtDeflation|8 months ago
BJones12|8 months ago
unknown|8 months ago
[deleted]
Simulacra|8 months ago
ic_fly2|8 months ago
marcusb|8 months ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_em...
shakna|8 months ago
Install and updates are via a registry based system, and it supports Windows, Linux, macOS - because its mostly written in Ada and R, as of 2012. (Most are running on top of Linux, as far as I'm aware).
No floppy disks, no underrunning DOS, etc.
staplung|8 months ago
tw04|8 months ago
https://www.navcanada.ca/en/news/news-releases/nav-canada-an...
https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-air...
haiku2077|8 months ago
SoftTalker|8 months ago
buildsjets|8 months ago
Any fancy new system of, for example an in-cockpit text based clearance/routing display using an LTE network, will need to be backed up with a process that can be accomplished with a pencil, a compass, and silence.
For anyone considering doing development in this space, sign up for a 20 hour instrument flying ground school, preferably one taught by a retired old fart rather than a 25 year old “instructor” with no actual experience.
ThinkBeat|8 months ago
Floppy can be copied to hard disks and will not have to worry about failures of mechanical parts involved in reading floppy drives.
Developing a brand new system would take quit a lot of time. As all systems du if they need extreme uptime. Starting that effort now is ok but I would guess it would be take at leas a couple of years. Significant work would have to understand in detail what the current system does and does not do, and then map out what a system should do.
DocTomoe|8 months ago
Virtualization just adds another layer of complexity to an already fragile system which literally thousands of human lives depend on every day. Adding more complexity is not a neutral act here, but neglectful manslaughter waiting to happen. Aviation is a low-tech, never-touch-a-running-system, risk-averse environment for a reason.
Floppies were useful because you could easily take them and take them to another, secondary, sometimes air gapped backup system. Replacing this functionality means replicating not just the data transfer, but also the safety architecture - which includes physical isolation and manual fallback paths. To recreate, the best chance would probably be something like storing the relevant info on thumb drives - but then you have whole new family of attack vectors by hostile forces (anyone still remember Stuxnet), which floppies did not have in that form?
And then there's the pesky aspect of international interoperability. One country alone cannot just storm forward. We are looking at decades of upgrades and alignments here. And that process already is underway. But proposing a radical change without acknowledging the full scope of what that entails - from certification cycles to human factors to geopolitical coordination - is not progress, it’s hubris.
HPsquared|8 months ago
hulitu|8 months ago
... running Windows 11. Flight delayed because Windows is updating.
branon|8 months ago
Presumably (hopefully) the existing system is airgapped in some way or otherwise restricted to communication with other ATC systems, so DOSBox-X running Win95/98[1] could act as a drop-in replacement for the software side...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44214386
2OEH8eoCRo0|8 months ago
topspin|8 months ago
I watched this happen with floppy media. When floppy disks were common in the 80's you had great quality disks from top tier Japanese manufacturers at low cost. Media failure was rare and you could rely on a disk day after day for years. Then, as demand for floppies dropped, and these manufacturers fobbed off legacy products to low cost manufacturers, floppy media became terrible.
By the mid to late 90's, floppy media bought retail was very unreliable. For a brief time I was salvaging stacks of disks that came with commercial software because the software vendors were still able to secure good media, while the retail blanks you found in stores was just this side of e-waste. I used them with expensive instruments that had integral (high quality) floppy drives, long after PCs stopped using them.
stackedinserter|8 months ago
Yossarrian22|8 months ago
jmclnx|8 months ago
The problem, once Congress gets wind of the amount of real money that will need to be spent, plus the time it will really take to develop and fully test, it is cancelled.
Of course I fully expect this to be TIP (Test in Production), thus for maybe 10 years, flying in the US could be very dangerous. Lets hope the pilots will be able to manually avoid other planes.
jeffreygoesto|8 months ago
jillesvangurp|8 months ago
An interesting point here is maybe that there's a whole world outside the US where planes fly and communicate. For example the EU has its own issues on this front but is modernizing what it does. Airspaces here are pretty dense and busy. It's not necessary to reinvent a lot of wheels here. The US could just look across its borders and learn from what is being done there.
As soon as there's a reasonable budget for this, there are all sorts of perfectly reasonable things that can be done. The core issue isn't technical.
RandomBacon|8 months ago
disc - optical
disk - not optical
Eg.: floppy disks and DVD discs
heisenbit|8 months ago
os2warpman|8 months ago
As far as I can tell the only systems that use floppy disks are IDS-4 terminals, of which there are a couple hundred left in the US, the rest having been upgraded (to IDS-5 or similar systems) over the last 30 years.
I don't know if it is small regional airports with no money, large international airports with few moments of downtime time needed for the upgrade, a mix those two, bad luck with the bureaucratic wheel-of-priorities spin, or what.
But there's no context to any of these articles, only "FLOPPY DRIVES LOL" so I had to take the time to find out what systems were actually impacted.
I mean, it could have been an old HP Oscilloscope in a RF rack that used floppy drives to store images and log data, or it could have been the Master Control Program of the entire air traffic control network.
There's a slight difference in impact between those two.
It appears as though there are multiple competitors/replacements to IDS-4 so the solution is to cut a check and block off some time on the calendar.
edit: every single journalist who just grabs a couple of tweets, adds some commentary, and dusts off their hands muttering "job well done" should encased in a Lucite cube and displayed in the town square as an object of ridicule.
osigurdson|8 months ago
jessekv|8 months ago
I imagine log4j wasn't a problem either.
kgwxd|8 months ago
naveen99|8 months ago
sidibe|8 months ago
observer987|8 months ago
ralphc|8 months ago
p_l|8 months ago
131hn|8 months ago
domoregood|8 months ago
tsuru|8 months ago
can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?
johnisgood|8 months ago
If anyone knows what ATC software they are using in the wild, let me know. A screenshot would suffice.
fallingknife|8 months ago
asdefghyk|8 months ago
know-how|8 months ago
[deleted]
aurizon|8 months ago