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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

#31

Post by guax »

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.

I think any of the "off the shelf" gotek emulators should suffice for this. They're made for people to keep playing games on old hardware. I would assume copy protection and other shenanigans would be the creme de la creme of abusing the hardware.

This is to get rid of the media only. You'll still be using the original compute hardware. But it would be an interesting step.

I feel that most of the desire to upgrade is cultural and not technical. People love to talk about the floppies being used while its just a small part of the equation. Cost and risk of creating a new system with the same reliability expectations is hard when the incumbent has decades of iteration. For systems that do not require more performance or energy efficiency the accounting on upgrading looks very different.

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

#32

Post by jmclnx »

Isn't this try # 10000000 ?

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.

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

#33

Post by squigz »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #28
demosthanos wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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.

Well this isn't very long in terms of overhauling safety-critical systems that have many decades worth of processes and infrastructure built up around them, is it?

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

#37

Post by jillesvangurp »

jeffreygoesto wrote: post #6

The latest "Last Week Tonight" episode on Air Traffic Controllers is quite interesting. Learned about the floppy discs there.

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.

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

#38

Post by mcv »

sverhagen wrote: post #12
latexr wrote: post #7

> 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)

It's going to be all Windows 11 of course. Including all the additional services nobody ever needed but now suddenly needs.

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

#39

Post by hulitu »

skissane wrote: post #8
burnt-resistor wrote: post #2

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…

> 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…

> likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows,

famous last words. /s

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

#40

Post by hulitu »

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…

> A first step to mitigate some of the risk would be to move the system to a virtualised system.

... running Windows 11. Flight delayed because Windows is updating.

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