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United States Technology

Ancient US Air Traffic Control Systems Won't Get a Tech Refresh Before 2030 (theregister.com) 84

Posted by BeauHD from the don't-hold-your-breath dept.
The FAA's air traffic control systems are significantly out of date and won't be updated until the 2030s, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). The Register reports: In a report released Monday, the GAO said that 51 of the FAA's 138 ATC systems -- more than a third -- were unsustainable due to a lack of parts, shortfalls in funding to sustain them, or a lack of technology refresh funding to replace them. A further 54 systems were described as "potentially unsustainable" for similar reasons, with the added caveat that tech refresh funding was available to them. "FAA has 64 ongoing investments aimed at modernizing 90 of the 105 unsustainable and potentially unsustainable systems," the GAO said in its report. "However, the agency has been slow to modernize the most critical and at-risk systems."

The report said the seemingly perilous status of 17 systems was "especially concerning" as these are deemed to have critical operational impact at the same time as being unsustainable and having extended completion dates -- the first of them won't be modernized until 2030 at the earliest. Others aren't planned to be complete until 2035, and four of the 17 "most critical and at-risk FAA ATC systems" have no modernization plans at all. Of the systems on the list, two are more than 40 years old, and a further seven have been in service for more than 30 years.
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Ancient US Air Traffic Control Systems Won't Get a Tech Refresh Before 2030 More

Ancient US Air Traffic Control Systems Won't Get a Tech Refresh Before 2030

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  • Never fear, citizens!

    Your government is on the case! We have our 2nd lowest bidder* working the problem with their top people**.

    *Of course, it's only a few big boys who bother to go through the hoops (that they helped erect) necessary to even bid on federal contracts.

    **Well, top elligible people. Can't have federal contractors hiring purely on merit, after all. We have to make sure they're unionized, sufficiently female, sufficiently not-too-white, and sufficiently gay or gender something-something (all kin

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      On the plus side, we could say it matches perfectly flying with Boeing and at least the pair makes an homogeneous, thus less disparate flying environment reducing the risks inherent of component mismatchs! /s

    • Yeah, let Boeing work on it instead.

      • You jest but Boeing owns various current ATC systems through subsidiaries and the contracts for the replacement are also going to (amongst others) Boeing got ~$4B about a decade ago for just a demo of what such system could look like.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      The bidding regulations are stamped in law by Congress. Mostly they are to stop sweetheart deals between gov. and business. Effectively though, there are only a few companies for most government programs.

      The regs for federal contractors are written to prevent money going to shady businesses, regardless of your fevered dreams. But rest assured if the former alleged president regains the ability to screw America, he will make it certain that every company doing business with the gov. will adhere to the same e

      • So... all executive officers must be children or spouses of the CEO, all signed financial statements are advisory only, and no refunds as all sales are final.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      Having worked with the FAA, it's worse than that. There are companies that have solutions and will do the installations, but the internal FAA processes move so slowly that nothing ever gets done.

      It's not ground breaking technology either, lots of other countries already have updated systems and have been using them for years.

      • And this is because congress requires it, and congress requires it because constituents don't want contractors fleecing the government for the tax dollars. When rules are loosened, contractors will often take advantage of it (companies do not have an inherent built-in sense of morality). So it's been slow going for many decades.

        However I think there are some more inherent flaws occuring. The budgets to improve stuff are short term. You get money to build out a new system, and money to maintain the syste

    • There are many problems with government contracting. The first part of your post addresses some of the biggest once. Sadly you combine it with a screed that's completely irrelevant such that the entire comment is diminished.

    • The problem is that they can't spend money they don't have. Corporations just spend more than they need on needless upgrades, but government services are highly constrained. Spend too much and you risk having congress thinks you are wasteful, spend too little and you risk having a congressional committee ask why you screwed up.

  • Windows 95 (Score:3)

    by banbeans ( 122547 ) on Tuesday September 24, 2024 @09:00PM (#64814993)

    Next time you fly remember the ATC software is running on win95 in some areas.

    • I never understood why anyone outside Gamers would use WIn 95 for anything given that NT 4 was out in 1996 and NT 3.51 was before that.

      • Re:Windows 95 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Tuesday September 24, 2024 @09:16PM (#64815013) Homepage Journal

        I never understood why anyone outside Gamers would use WIn 95 for anything given that NT 4 was out in 1996 and NT 3.51 was before that.

        Better DOS compatibility. If I paid $$$$ for a DOS-based CAD system that wouldn't run under anything that wasn't 100%-DOS-compatible, I'd be running it either under an emulation environment or natively under DOS or Win95/98/ME or a DOS clone. If it were 1995, that would mean running it natively.

      • NT 3.5.1 wasn't all that great. NT was getting close to ready, but needed more compute power than a lot of organizations were willing to pay for on their desktop.

      • Hardware support (Score:5, Interesting)

        by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Wednesday September 25, 2024 @03:06AM (#64815433) Homepage Journal

        Windows NT 4 had relatively poor hardware support and relatively few third party hardware drivers. It was a kind of similar situation to where Linux has been at various times - if you ensured you stuck with supported hardware, you were fine, but a lot of cheaper hardware had no NT drivers. Windows 95 had more third party drivers available, and it could also use Windows 3.1-style VxD drivers, and even (slowly) thunk through DOS drivers for storage devices.

        Windows NT 4 didn't support dynamic hardware changes in any meaningful way, so plugging in or removing most USB devices required a reboot (including mass storage devices). Windows 98 had passable USB support, which was increasingly important at the end of the '90s. Windows USB support only really got sorted out in Windows 2000.

        There was a pile of Windows 3 and Windows 9x software that accessed serial ports and parallel ports directly from application code. You couldn't do this on Windows NT. You needed a driver to deal with arbitration and provide access to the application (e.g. dlportio). Some applications supported this so they could run on NT, but most didn't. If you had some exotic parallel port device and the software required direct port access from application code, you were stuck with Windows 9x.

        • I got along just fine with both NT 3.51 and NT 4, and back to the topic, it seems likely that critical systems like ATC, banks, ATMs, and virtually everything that's not a gamers machine or sally the secretary would have been better off with a more robust platform. Even Sally would have been better off but her machine would have needed a bit more memory. I literally went from the VIC-20 up thru the Amiga and then onto NT platforms and Linux without a dalliance with 9x, and if I can do it I'm certain others

        • Windows NT 4 had relatively poor hardware support and relatively few third party hardware drivers.

          At first. Once manufactures like Dell and Compaq started selling it (and started slapping on those "Made for Windows 95/NT 4" labels) hardware support came along pretty quickly. NT just didn't have plug and play back then, and was further hurt by lack of built in USB support, right at a time when manufacturers were building USB ports into virtually all new PC's. Dell provided a third party USB package for NT 4 customers that worked pretty well. I still use it on a VirtualBox NT setup I have, and it generall

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ebyrob ( 165903 )

            > NT just didn't have plug and play back then

            NT just didn't have plug and *pray* back then

            Fixed that for you.

            For what it's worth I never had troubles with drivers till they started getting "easier". (read manual, apply settings, possibly reboot, worked every time) There was a nasty period where I had to choose IRQ numbers manually, but even then it worked as long as they didn't collide.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by davidwr ( 791652 )

      Next time you fly remember the ATC software is running on win95 in some areas.

      Not a problem. My income-tax suite runs just fine on mid-20th-century tech, namely, a ballpoint pen and paper.

      As for Windows 95 tech: Just keep it off the internet* and don't make any changes that haven't been thoroughly tested. But since this is air-traffic-control, I hope they would be doing that anyways.

      * Gateways that allow very limited data to cross from the internet to the ATC and back under tightly-controlled circumstances are/should be allowed, but only where necessary, where the interface is simp

    • Traditionally, it's been IBM mainframe hardware.

    • Next time you fly remember the ATC software is running on win95 in some areas.

      Running TRACON, no doubt.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by stooo ( 2202012 )

      France has some airport systems on 3.11
      https://www.zdnet.com/article/... [zdnet.com]

  • No big deal (Score:5, Funny)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday September 24, 2024 @09:43PM (#64815045)

    Thankfully most of our airplanes are Boeing aircraft which are known for their highly reliable operation so the occasional ATC glitch should be fine.

  • time to give amtrak priority it has by law (Score:3)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Tuesday September 24, 2024 @10:00PM (#64815065)

    time to give amtrak priority it has by law

  • an Ancient air traffic control system should work better than a human designed one, but you'd have to have someone with the ancient gene (eg John Sheppard or Jack O'Neil) to operate it.

    • but you'd have to have someone with the ancient gene

      There's an app, er, a gene therapy [fandom.com] for that.

      Not discussed was whether the ATA gene is Serial or Parallel.

    • an Ancient air traffic control system should work better than a human designed one, but you'd have to have someone with the ancient gene (eg John Sheppard or Jack O'Neil) to operate it.

      It's O'Neill, with *two* L's. There's another Colonel O'Neil with only one L. He has no sense of humor at all.

  • I'll bet some AI system could solve this issue in minutes by rewriting everything in Rust.

    • Nah, for more than 100 ground stations, you need Java. Write once, debug everywhere.

    • Your estimate relies on a very basic assumption, that we have a document(s) that define how that code works... we don't.

      Sure, we know what it's supposed to do - broadly - but we don't have a set of defining documents that describes the way the code actually does what it does.

      After several decades of countless programmers beating this code into shape with varying levels of defining documentation, we don't know enough to re-code the software, and if we translate the code programmatically, we can't prove the r

      • "we don't have a set of defining documents that describes the way the code actually does what it does"

        Of course we do, it's just not in a form that humans can understand and work with. We have the code. I believe the OP is talking about using AI to help unravel and rewrite the impossibly convoluted code. Whether or not that's actually practical is another matter, but there's nothing that appears inherently impossible about the concept.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      That's not really what we want though, that would just give us the same thing in a modern language. The whole system needs to be updated to take advantage of newer technology like electronic flight strips instead of paper ones

  • Maybe it is time to out-source rather than reinvent.

    • I'm pretty sure the problem would go away if the US aviation system just switched to 100% metric system.

  • Let's face it: the corporations that own the courts, government and people of the United States have sucked the nation dry. Most Americans live from paycheque to paycheque in a country with infrastructure that would make a Third World dictator blush.

    Dear god, people, get your scumbag politicians back under control. You're exporting your garbage to Canada now. Our next government will probably be led by a filthy little Conservative named Pierre Poilievre (we call him Little PeePee), funded by the same ri

    • ... your scumbag politicians ... under control ...

      That won't happen until US-ians stop voting for monopoly-interests ^H^H^H^H anti-socialism scare-tactics, 'muh free-dumbs' and celebrities who've done nothing and plan to do more of it.

      Politicians won't care; until campaigning affects their bank-balance less than their pay-cheque, voters care about long-term maintenance, government policy declares tax-cuts (to the rich) are bad.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Reboot USA. :P Or better, let's start a new colony and then nation like on the moon. Oh wait... :(

    • Dear god, people, get your scumbag politicians back under control. You're exporting your garbage to Canada now. Our next government will probably be led by a filthy little Conservative named Pierre Poilievre (we call him Little PeePee), funded by the same right wing US multimillionaires who have turned your country into a cesspool.

      At the risk of sounding like an asshole, why did you let those assholes into your country? At this point anyone showing up from the USA in a modern country should be turned away by the Port Authority. To use a certain US politician's wording: "They aren't sending their best." (Because their best cannot afford to leave.)

  • thats the earliest Boeing can fit in the development project/

  • Oh, that's right, Raygun, in order to start the war against unions, broke the Air Traffic Controllers in '81... and the reason they were striking was outdated computers (like 15 yr old). In, I think, his second term (while he was doing what Nancy told him to do that she heard from her astrologer), they finally replaced the computers.

    But sure, let's cut taxes, what do we use them for anyway? /snark

    • The reason they were striking, like 99.99% of strikes, is they wanted more money and better working conditions. The computers may have been one component of the working conditions, or may have just been a pretext. The problem was the controllers were overworked.

      Before long, they will be striking because automation is taking their jobs.

    • Reagan's political opponents have long painted the action as a union busting move, but that's always been a lie. Reagan had once been the head of the Screen Actors' Guild (a labor union) and thus had some appreciation for the role of unions.

      The reason Reagan fired the PATCO folks was far more important and principled: When the United States government was formed, there were no labor unions of government workers. In fact, NO president of either party supported allowing government workers to unionize until JF

  • Maybe they could do it sooner if they hired those Haitians, or maybe the Venezuelans.

  • Our politicians [BOTH parties] could keep America's airports and air traffic control system up-to-date and well-maintained, OR they can spend approx $150Billion per year on illegal immigrants so their "campaign contributor" employers can get cheap labor, and maybe get some new future voters who will owe them some votes...

    Our politicians [BOTH parties] could keep America's airports and air traffic control system up-to-date and well-maintained, OR they can spend approx $60Billion per year on foreign aid, sati

  • Like all old things, they were built better and last longer. I'll be damned if I buy a new dryer. Mine's from 1972.

  • A friend of mine was working on an ATC system back in the late 80s. Like so many other government projects, everybody got paid over the years but the project itself never saw the light of day. Say what you want about Elon Musk but the recent flap with the head of the FAA, who doesn't know jack squat, tells you everything you need to know about how government needs to be cut down several pegs.

  • System P is only 2 years old

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