Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FAA to eliminate floppy disks used in air traffic control systems

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 197 posts

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

#61

Post by lurking_swe »

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.

So what happens when a plane has a critical failure (related to this P2P communication), how does it land? How would other planes nearby magically know what the plane that is in distress is going to do? It’s basically an unpredictable peer in the network.

YOLO i guess? :)

Hypothetically the nearby planes can detect that unresponsive plane on radar or other sensors, and try to react together as an intelligent swarm, to avoid it and let that plane land manually. But it’s not so simple. Planes are not loaded with full fuel tanks, only a bit extra. Some planes may have already underwent a go-around if the airport is busy. So it’s not just “land without crashing”, it’s also a prioritization issue.

IMO we certainly need humans in the loop, in a centralized fashion, to “orchestrate” a manual emergency landing if there is some critical cascading failure or bug in the software. I agree that in the happy path (99% of cases) it’s possible to automate it all. In theory.

Things get more complicated when you consider that small planes (flown for hobby, flight school, etc) have waaaaay less tech. That can’t work in some peer to peer fashion without a major upgrade to all those planes too. And the owners of those planes are not corporations making billions.

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

#62

Post by nradov »

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.

There's nothing to be gained by waiting. It's not like the transition will be easier or safer a year from now.

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

#63

Post by lurking_swe »

fallingknife wrote: post #55
viraptor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We operate cars on the road with not only no centralized system, but also minimally defined and enforced protocol, and yet Waymo has achieved a near zero collision rate inside a swarm of cars that are not running equivalent software. And this is in a situation where cars are only a few feet from each other while operating at top speed. So you can come up with a million objections but they are all solvable. As for aut…

99.9% success rate is probably not good enough when you consider that the vehicle in question costs $200 million, and has 150 - 350 humans on board. It’s not a “whoopsie” like with cars where the damage is $50k at most (waymo vehicle) and maybe 2-3 people injured or dead. Also dead pilots who are already in short supply.

Also cars only care about what’s going on in a horizontal plane. 3D space is clearly more complex and probably requires more computational power i’m sure. Consider that boeing couldn’t even correctly write software to keep their 737 MAX planes from crashing into the ground (MCAS software issue). Something that simple was too hard for them. Speaks volumes doesn’t it?

Not saying it’s impossible. Just saying that this clearly isn’t a “just do it” problem. Waymo’s been working on their software for how many years now? and they still have minor crashes lol. Not an easy problem at all.

Also consider that airlines usually outsource their software development so they don’t have cutting edge expertise in house.

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

#64

Post by nradov »

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…

Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date is essential if you want to retain the capability to upgrade at all. You have to exercise your upgrade muscles, otherwise they become weak and flabby. At some point you're so far behind that upgrading becomes nearly impossible, and then everything just collapses.

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

#65

Post by const_cast »

fallingknife wrote: post #55
viraptor wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We operate cars on the road with not only no centralized system, but also minimally defined and enforced protocol, and yet Waymo has achieved a near zero collision rate inside a swarm of cars that are not running equivalent software. And this is in a situation where cars are only a few feet from each other while operating at top speed. So you can come up with a million objections but they are all solvable. As for aut…

Waymo is significantly more dangerous than air travel to a degree that the comparison is actively offensive to everyone currently alive on Earth.

We can't even get cars, working in more-or-less two dimensions, to go without constantly running into each other and being one of the major causes of death in human civilizations. Waymo "solved" that problem in about, oh let me see here... yeah 0.0001% of cases. So, we're almost there! That's, like a couple cities out of all cities on Earth.

Yeah that's bad. Really, really, really bad. Like so bad it's not even worth talking about and comparing to air travel.

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

#67

Post by p_l »

ralphc wrote: post #66

I get having to use old software, but why did they pick Windows 95 and not NT, which is more robust?

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.

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

#68

Post by jiggawatts »

gladiatr72 wrote: post #22
jiggawatts wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

That migration occurred in 2007, the whole thing was replaced by a web app in 2017. Over that decade they saved many millions of dollars. Large scale disturbed legacy hardware is much more expensive than Citrix licenses!

When we started in 2007, systems still using floppies were considered ludicrously legacy and people could hardly believe me when I told them it was still in production and used for a critical system affecting millions of people.

Anyone still using floppies in 2025 has no excuse, stop trying to justify incompetence and sloth.

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

#69

Post by jiggawatts »

DocTomoe wrote: post #24
jiggawatts wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> How many lives would you have extinguished

I’ve worked on life & death Citrix modernisation projects several times: the local equivalent of the 911 emergency phone call centre and then computers on wheels used for during paediatric surgeries. A help line for suicidal children too.

People conflate the usecase with the technology, assuming that “important thing” must have some mystical properties that requires legacy or some other “special flavor” of IT architecture. They’re wrong.

The best example of this flawed thinking was some person arguing with me about the computer upgrade that F-22 fighters are receiving this year… to the same level of performance as a first-gen Apple Watch!

Of course, that costs an absurd amount of money and is already delayed.

“But it’s a stealth fighter!” people will argue until they’re blue in the face.

Sure. Yes. But that’s a property of the outside surface, not the computer inside.

Other modern fighters, including stealth fighters, have hilariously better computers for a fraction of the cost. The F-22 procurement process was corrupted and some vendor is doing the minimum, twenty years late, at ten times the price. That’s what happened. Everything else is a “story”. A fiction. A cover of the ass type.

Same thing here. There’s a contract for providing IT services to the FAA. It’s a bad contract. That’s what happened. That’s all. There is no mystical or magical capability provided by floppies that can’t be better served by, for example, USB thumb drives.

Post reply on HN