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FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

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Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#21

Post by Craighead »

HPsquared wrote: post #13
ThinkBeat wrote: post #10

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 sys…

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.

[dead]

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#22

Post by gladiatr72 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #19
DocTomoe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neglectfu…

Eeeeexcept that floppies are horrifically unreliable. I remember feeding disk number 27 out of 33 only to get a "bad sector" error an hour into a software install. I'm still salty about that one. "It's not broken" is the cry of the bad manager that hasn't done the proper analysis, hasn't actually looked at the pros and cons, but has simply become complacent and comfortable with the devil they know. If they're still u…

You make good points, but now Citrix and Microsoft have them over a barrel. Curious how such a migration looks in 2025 with Microsoft pushing everything to Azure, though and Citrix's acquisition by Vista Equity (2022).

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#23

Post by Simulacra »

DebtDeflation wrote: post #20

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.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#24

Post by DocTomoe »

jiggawatts wrote: post #19
DocTomoe wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 neglectfu…

Eeeeexcept that floppies are horrifically unreliable. I remember feeding disk number 27 out of 33 only to get a "bad sector" error an hour into a software install. I'm still salty about that one. "It's not broken" is the cry of the bad manager that hasn't done the proper analysis, hasn't actually looked at the pros and cons, but has simply become complacent and comfortable with the devil they know. If they're still u…

> I remember feeding disk number 27 out of 33 only to get a "bad sector" error an hour into a software install. I'm still salty about that one.

That's why mission-critical systems have several sets of floppy disks, and disk-multiplication stations.

> Would you? Really? Or would you recoil in horror at the very idea?

Depends. If the old system is certified and has all error modes defined, while the other new system is a black box with exciting new ways to screw up, I'd go old system ten out of ten times. Which incidentally is why NASA uses ancient chips when they build new robotic drones.

> I worked on a large scale DOS-era software virtualisation project where we moved ~20K users onto a Windows + Citrix platform.

Respectfully: How many lives would you have extinguished had your new system failed? How many failure modes did you encounter during your virtualisation project? How many external systems - which also relied on a very specific way of doing things and would have murdered people if talked to wrongly did you interface with?

No need to answer. We have all had such projects. We know things break before, during, and after the switchover. Only in some environments, systems absolutely cannot break, ever. Aviation is not your average 'let's get us a new mail server' migration project.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#25

Post by mpweiher »

Simulacra wrote: post #23
DebtDeflation wrote: post #20

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.

Er...they actually tried and failed.

"I stopped counting long ago, but there have been many, many attempts to try to modernize the US’s air traffic control (ATC) system over the years"

https://crankyflier.com/2025/05/12/the-us-government-tries-t...

I am sure you can find better sources as there are so many of them.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#26

Post by demosthanos »

Simulacra wrote: post #23
DebtDeflation wrote: post #20

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.

I see this the opposite way: kudos to the FAA for sticking it out so long on legacy hardware and software as long as they have!

ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them.

If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#27

Post by fallingknife »

tsuru wrote: post #5

So what does a modern ATC look like? can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?

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.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#28

Post by csdreamer7 »

demosthanos wrote: post #26
Simulacra wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see this the opposite way: kudos to the FAA for sticking it out so long on legacy hardware and software as long as they have! ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Up…

> ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them.

I do not have enough knowledge to disagree on this. But I will say the FAA is still on floppy disks when the US Nuclear Arsenal moved off floppies back in 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy...

Yes, they have different requirements and yes, SACCS was using 8 inch IBM mainframe floppies from the 70s, but they are both 24/7 critical systems.

> If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.

The real answer is likely embarrassing incidents that came up during the start of this presidency. There is now political will to address it; instead of 'before' it becomes a problem. They are on Windows 95-it was budget issues.

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#29

Post by trehalose »

fallingknife wrote: post #27
tsuru wrote: post #5

So what does a modern ATC look like? can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?

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.

What happens when an airplane's pilots have to radio ATC to request an emergency landing, and the planes' sensors have failed so it can't safety land itself?

Re: FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

#30

Post by viraptor »

fallingknife wrote: post #27
tsuru wrote: post #5

So what does a modern ATC look like? can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?

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.

Unfortunately that's not how things work in practice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain_(computing) If Jepsen fails every database coming from single source, imagine the chaos of synchronising a P2P of various clients of various versions over a very noisy link. We can't even achieve that with home automation meshes that send maybe 3 types of messages!

Also you need to handle planes without computers - you can land a personal plane at almost any airport. (With lots of caveats but still) Also you need to handle planes with failing automation. Also you really want to know the situation on the runways, so there's really no need to remove the single source of truth here.

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