How many 747s are still in operation? I thought they were being phased out
400ish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_747_operators
Looks like a lot of them are cargo operators.
Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
21–30 of 165 posts
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#22The article said the floppy drive is kept behind a locked panel. The article doesn't mention if the updates fit on a single floppy or a stack of 20 floppies. I don't see a fundamental problem as long as the data has checksums to make sure that it transferred successfully. I used to get tons of errors on floppy disks transferring data back in the 90's using Sun workstations and PCs. I started making my own checksums t…
> a stack of 20 floppies
Well now I'm having flashbacks of installing "Strike Commander".
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#23How many 747s are still in operation? I thought they were being phased out
Phased out for passenger service but being bought up by cargo carriers.
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#24The headline is misleading. According to the story text, the floppy is used to load a new navigation database , which is important to be sure but not a critical software update.
Navigation is not critical? It seems like a pretty dangerous turn of events to try a low-visibility landing based on outdated navigation data.
Navigation data is important, which is why it's required to be refreshed within 28 days (this was a big worry during the recent Garmin outage BTW), but whether it's critical depends on often domain-specific definitions. AFAIK it doesn't meet that standard by either software or aviation standards. Also, it's definitely not software, so "critical software updates" is still incorrect.
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#25i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…
That says more about "the bear", and the overbearing nature of the compliance process, then it does about the wisdom or foolishness of relying on an aging hardware platform like the floppy more generally. Most industries don't deal with that. Maybe if this process had actually proved sufficient to prevent the 737 Max woes, we would pay it more respect?
Arguably the 737 Max disaster was caused by an attempt to side step the regulatory process and get a new plane certified when it shouldn’t have. If the FAA hadn’t been so captured by Boeing, those two planes wouldn’t have crashed.
All in all I can’t understand how one can look at the state of the airline manufacturing in the past 50 years and decide that less regulation is needed. Except for the MAX 8, phenomenal gains in airline safety have been gained over this time period, throwing all that away so that it’s easier to upgrade some old hardware seems incredibly foolish.
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#26While this probably wouldn't pass muster with whoever certifies the 747's avionics, over in the retrocomputing world the solution to "It only uses floppies" has been the cheap Gotek floppy emulators that read from a USB stick running this free firmware: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy It has a great number of hardware mods that give it a display and a rotary encoder for better disk selection: https://github.com/…
Agreed. Not for avionics, but I cannot overstate how much of an improvement the Gotek/Lotharek/various other Floppy Disk/scsi to SD solutions are over finding NOS/still working storage media from that era.
Ive a couple of old samplers from Emu and Ensoniq that I can continue using and not worrying (as much) about data loss and storage.
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#27i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…
That says more about "the bear", and the overbearing nature of the compliance process, then it does about the wisdom or foolishness of relying on an aging hardware platform like the floppy more generally. Most industries don't deal with that. Maybe if this process had actually proved sufficient to prevent the 737 Max woes, we would pay it more respect?
> Maybe if this process had actually proved sufficient to prevent the 737 Max woes, we would pay it more respect?
A better measure is passenger deaths per kilometer.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fatalities_per_reven...
It's been on a steady, large decline since the 1970s. Even with the 737 MAX crashes, it's an incredibly safe way to travel.
In the last ten years, one passenger has died on a US carrier due to an aircraft issue. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines_Flight_1380)
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#28i'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life,…
I worry how companies will be able to provide similar services in the future, as more and more stuff is running as services in the cloud.
It’ll most likely become more and more costly, as you won’t be able to buy offline version of some complement, and keep it working on your support device for 30 years. You’ll need to build all of them yourself. And that will also most likely mean it’ll be less reliable.
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
That says more about "the bear", and the overbearing nature of the compliance process, then it does about the wisdom or foolishness of relying on an aging hardware platform like the floppy more generally. Most industries don't deal with that. Maybe if this process had actually proved sufficient to prevent the 737 Max woes, we would pay it more respect?
Arguably the 737 Max disaster was caused by an attempt to side step the regulatory process and get a new plane certified when it shouldn’t have. If the FAA hadn’t been so captured by Boeing, those two planes wouldn’t have crashed. All in all I can’t understand how one can look at the state of the airline manufacturing in the past 50 years and decide that less regulation is needed. Except for the MAX 8, phenomenal gai…
> how one can look at the state of the airline manufacturing in the past 50 years and decide that less regulation is needed
Less regulation = rich founder kids gets lambos + utter destruction of society = good :thumbsup:
Re: Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
#30Did it work? Yes.
Was it secure? Yes.
So, what's the problem? Updating 30-year-old gear with media from its era seems to make sense.
If they were really wedded to digital media and needed to bridge that gap, Sony used to make a floppy disk that you could jam a memory stick into and it would read in a normal 3½ inch floppy drive. Very cool gadget.