FAA To Eliminate Floppy Disks Used In Air Traffic Control Systems (tomshardware.com) 135
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: The head of the Federal Aviation Administration just outlined an ambitious goal to upgrade the U.S.'s air traffic control (ATC) system and bring it into the 21st century. According to NPR, most ATC towers and other facilities today feel like they're stuck in the 20th century, with controllers using paper strips and floppy disks to transfer data, while their computers run Windows 95. While this likely saved them from the disastrous CrowdStrike outage that had a massive global impact, their age is a major risk to the nation's critical infrastructure, with the FAA itself saying that the current state of its hardware is unsustainable.
"The whole idea is to replace the system. No more floppy disks or paper strips," acting FAA administrator Chris Rocheleau told the House Appropriations Committee last Wednesday. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also said earlier this week," 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." The aviation industry put up a coalition pushing for ATC modernization called Modern Skies, and it even ran an ad telling us that ATC is still using floppy disks and several older technologies to keep our skies safe. [...]
Currently, the White House hasn't said what this update will cost. The FAA has already put out a Request For Information to gather data from companies willing to take on the challenge of upgrading the entire system. It also announced several 'Industry Days' so companies can pitch their tech and ideas to the Transportation Department. Duffy said that the Transportation Department aims to complete the project within four years. However, industry experts say this timeline is unrealistic. No matter how long it takes, it's high time that the FAA upgrades the U.S.'s ATC system today after decades of neglect.
"The whole idea is to replace the system. No more floppy disks or paper strips," acting FAA administrator Chris Rocheleau told the House Appropriations Committee last Wednesday. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy also said earlier this week," 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." The aviation industry put up a coalition pushing for ATC modernization called Modern Skies, and it even ran an ad telling us that ATC is still using floppy disks and several older technologies to keep our skies safe. [...]
Currently, the White House hasn't said what this update will cost. The FAA has already put out a Request For Information to gather data from companies willing to take on the challenge of upgrading the entire system. It also announced several 'Industry Days' so companies can pitch their tech and ideas to the Transportation Department. Duffy said that the Transportation Department aims to complete the project within four years. However, industry experts say this timeline is unrealistic. No matter how long it takes, it's high time that the FAA upgrades the U.S.'s ATC system today after decades of neglect.
Paper strips (Score:2)
Is he referring to punch card systems?
Re: Paper strips (Score:2)
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At one time ATC used paper strips to designate individual aircraft, moving them from one station to another as that aircraft moved from entry to the controlled area, to the pattern, approach, and finally landing. It can work, but it is a bit clumsy, and controllers had to be multitasking constantly. Sort of like playing two sets of drums at once, to different songs. Very demanding. A more automated system could reduce their workload and potentially, as it is further refined, and help reduce errors and accid
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BTW, 'At one time' I think means this morning...
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So basically old-school kanban, but with aircraft instead of tasks.
Re: Paper strips (Score:2)
I'm betting kanban was informed by strip dispatching, but it didn't predate it. Paper strips were first used in the US in 1936.
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Despite what most people's initial reaction is, it's extremely efficient AND highly reliable. You can even fall back to hand writing the strips in the event of a failure. Electronic systems? not so much...
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I challenge you to come up with a more efficient and resilient system than the "paper strips".
You solution must have 99.999% uptime, work without mains indefinitely, survive hardware failures, be intuitive and easily understood, and a host of other properties that the paper strips have, which is why they are still in use. Not because they are "old and underfunded", but because the alternatives are worse.
The electronic systems? Sure those probably need to be upgraded. But making something digital just to mak
Re:Paper strips (Score:5, Informative)
He's referring to the flight progress strips that list flight number, aircraft type, departure, and destination. The entire US ATC system looks like it came out of the 1970s because, well, it kind of did.
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Do I sense some pent-up anger there? :D
Re:Paper strips (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably, but then you absolutely should be angry about this.
Re:Paper strips (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree it's worth being angry about, the problem is that blaming this on Republicans is simply bullshit. The issue appears to be the typical "bureaucracy cannot accomplish useful work" rather than the claimed "mustache twirling villains are responsible."
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When the bureaucracy needs money and manpower to accomplish useful work, and one side has consistently denied them that money and manpower, I think it is more than fair to point the finger at Republicans. Anything less is just being purposefully ignorant.
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When the bureaucracy needs money and manpower to accomplish useful work, and one side has consistently denied them that money and manpower, I think it is more than fair to point the finger at Republicans. Anything less is just being purposefully ignorant.
Given that a Republican controlled congress (with broad bipartisan support) and a Republican president appropriated that money and manpower 22 years ago [wikipedia.org], I would say that you are the one being purposefully ignorant.
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Yes, they started the program 22 years ago, but it requires frequent reauthorization. If you look at the record of Republicans voting to fund the FAA since then (22 years is a long time ago), you'll find that they generally haven't been giving the agency the resources they've been asking for, even just to maintain a level of operational effectiveness, nevermind adequately fund a whole new ATC system.
From https://www.transportation.gov... [transportation.gov]:
"Over the past 15 years, the annual appropriation to the Facilities an
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If you look at the record of Republicans voting to fund the FAA since then (22 years is a long time ago), you'll find that they generally haven't been giving the agency the resources they've been asking for, even just to maintain a level of operational effectiveness, nevermind adequately fund a whole new ATC system.
Your link only says, essentially, "congress should have given us more money" and not "evil mustache twirling republicans are the reason for our problems." So, I did look.
The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 (first I could find post Dubya administration) was, indeed, somewhat contentious (most house democrats voting against the final conference bill, though the senate was less divided). I don't know why the bill was controversial, maybe it was direct funding, but I don't have the data. The FAA Rea
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There's been more than a few times that Democrats have had a bicameral majority in Congress, and fixing this particular problem was nowhere near the agenda.
Why isn't it their fault too?
I say this as someone who is about as anti-MAGA as it gets. But you can't deal with problems if you aren't being honest about the problems.
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They're is no alternative to bureaucracy for doing useful work at scale. There's is not one example ever where large scale works are achieved without it.
Re:Paper strips (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, while it's true that all the Republican presidents since the 1970s have failed to update the system, there have also been a number of Democrat presidents in that time period, and they've done just as little as the republicans about it.
There's quite a few things like this. You have a system in place, which is of critical importance and while generally everyone takes for granted that it always works there would be severe problems if it stopped working. So updating it is potentially expensive and difficult, and there's a risk something will fail during the update with catastrophic consequences, while just leaving it alone costs nothing, and everything still works as expected. So the politicians just take the easy option.
Where I live there are many things like this, public infrastructure including railways, public utilities, industrial software, banking systems, software that runs hospital equipment etc etc. From what I've heard it's very similar in most other places in Europe and probably in the world. While things are working they're just left alone, up until they stop working or are about to, at which point everyone starts running around in panic. See Y2K for example. So it's a good thing they're at least updating this system now.
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Updating things is a thankless task. You could spend a couple of years carefully doing all the work just right so that when the switch-over came, nothing went wrong. And would one single voter change from "undecided" to voting your party because of it? Not likely - the general population just doesn't understand or doesn't care - they just expect it to work, and all you did was do that. Conversely, if you bungle the updates and cause some downtime, then you'll see some people saying they'll never vote for yo
Remember FAA Advanced Automation System (Score:3)
The biggest complete failure of a US software project. See here [wikipedia.org].
1982 - 1994. Twelve years of effort, pure waterfall design/test/implement, everything was believed on schedule until the last minute.
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Looking at the history of NextGen, it sufferers form feature creep more than anything. Upgrading and replacing air traffic control systems led to including new aircraft systems to support new features and methods. Remote towers. Communications.
Sounds like the NMCI all over again. Read up, that was a lot of fun.
Such projects need to be organized differently, I think. Demand deliverables for each feature or function, plan to implement additional features as they are practical and available. Lead. Seriously, n
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That's what happens when the shitass Republicans block updating the system for a few decades. And when America-hating senile assfucks in the vein of Ronald Reagan try to sabotage the system and leave us woefully behind in staff recruiting.
I'm just gonna put this [wikipedia.org] right here.
Two decades ago, Republican majorities in both houses and a Republican president.
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I'm all for being pissed at Republicans for when it's actually their fault. But there's been more than a few years in the past couple of decades where Democrats held bicameral majorities in Congress and this still didn't get done yet.
Let's not be partisan dipshits while trying to blame partisan dipshittery, yeah?
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Not a lot to go wrong though.
The more LoC get in between the radar and the radio, the more fragile everything becomes. Software aids can be worked without, but once indispensable software runs on Windows the things which can go wrong just multiplied by a couple orders of magnitude.
Re: Paper strips (Score:2)
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Re:Paper strips (Score:5, Informative)
No, they are strips of paper in plastic holders that the air traffic controllers use to sequence and track aircraft for take offs and landings.
Here is a quick video about Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport that shows the paper tapes, equipment, and routines of the air traffic controllers.
What It Takes To Be An Air Traffic Controller At The World's Busiest Airport [youtube.com]
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Punch cards and punch tape are different things. Hard to say which is older, though.
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Might just as well.
And why does everybody think the solution to replace the PCs?
The real question is why the IT infrastructure was allowed to rot for decades. Clearly that is a systematic issue, and it is not fixed by getting new PCs.
3rd party vendors? they better have NO DRM, NO KEY (Score:2)
3rd party vendors? they better have NO DRM, NO KEY servers. So they can't pull an broadcom and change the EULA holding the system hostage.
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3rd party vendors? they better have NO DRM, NO KEY servers. So they can't pull an broadcom and change the EULA holding the system hostage.
Don't sorry, they don't come with anything. No documentation. No quality assurance. A vendor that will disappear and be operating as a different LLC next month.
The DOGE bitches will vibe it in hours (Score:4, Funny)
Just load up the full power of Grok, and that shit's done.
Re: The DOGE bitches will vibe it in hours (Score:4, Funny)
Wrong Philosophy (Score:2)
Always online (Score:2)
If it ain't broken (Score:3)
why not keep using it if you have enough spare parts?
USB floppy emulators (Score:2)
why not keep using it if you have enough spare parts?
When was the last time someone made a floppy diskette?
Recently power on an old floppy drive, its 50/50 one or another plastic component hasn't degraded and will turn to dust when any force is applied to it.
Floppy diskettes, they are importing them from overseas where a case or two has been discovered in some deep dark corner. 50/50 the diskettes had mold growing inside.
That said there is kind of a solution. There are USB floppy emulators. They plug into an old floppy cable, emulate the signals prop
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I did, just this afternoon.
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When was the last time someone made a floppy diskette?
Just now. Every second while you are reading this: thousands run out of the factories....
However you likely have to look to Taiwan, Korea or Japan to get them.
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When was the last time someone made a floppy diskette?
Just now. Every second while you are reading this: thousands run out of the factories....
However you likely have to look to Taiwan, Korea or Japan to get them.
As usual with your claims, [citation needed]. Floppy disks being sold today new all appear to be old stock manufactured in prior years or used, rather than rolling off a production line (and, really, "thousands per second?" If we define "thousands" in the lowest possible term (i.e. "two") that would be 7.2 million per hour, 57.6 million per eight hour shift, 288 million per five day week at one shift per day, and roughly 15 billion per year... which is triple the number of floppy disks sold per year at th
Re: USB floppy emulators (Score:3)
No, AOL switched to drink coasters a LONG time ago.
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Kindly link to a single place where I can buy a new floppy disk that was manufactured in 2025.
Until you can do that, your entire comment is hallucinated bullshit.
Re: USB floppy emulators (Score:2)
I've got a still-foiled 10 pack in my drawers. If they run out, I'll donate it to the industry. Should keep them going for a few more decades.
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Because it has both huge maintenance costs and huge opportunity costs.
In the UK, some signal boxes still use mechanical interlocks. Any extension is crazy expensive, because you basically need artisans to manufacture these.
Digital technology is much cheaper, much more powerful, safer, requires fewer staff, and has been readily available since the 1980s.
Since the 1990s, we have communication systems for constant communication with the cab. Those can increase efficiency and safety very significantly.
Not upgra
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Risk due to obsolescence is a sign of something that is broken. Spare parts are a finite resource. The idea works well until you're out of spare parts. Someone managing this risk will do a Weibull analysis to determine *when* (not if) the system will stop functioning given the current spare capacity, and plan accordingly. Waiting until the spares run out is the worst possible strategy as some systems take many years to upgrade.
Also spares aren't the only issue. You run into capability problems as well. Do y
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Spare parts can degrade even when they're sitting in storage unused. Unless you are getting newly manufactured parts it's still very risky.
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Hard isn't impossible. Politicians just don't like doing hard things.
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Politicians just don't like doing hard things.
... and for good reason. Difficult projects are risky and expensive, and if they don't work on the first try, the voters blame the politician and then very soon afterwards he isn't a politician anymore (or at least, not an employed one). Even if they do succeed, the politician will get blamed if they turn out to be more expensive than predicted (which they always do, because that's the nature of difficult projects).
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And if they do work, no one will notice.
Or, worse, they'll credit the politician who happens to be in office at the time, even if he/she voted against the project in the first place.
Re:Always online (Score:5, Insightful)
The trouble with this shit is the train literally moves a million people every fucking day from early in the morning to late at night. It's incredibly difficult to upgrade such a massive system while it's running.
The "safe" way to do it is leave the old system in place and running, and install the new system next to it. Let them both run simultaneously for an extended period of time, with the old system still in charge and the new system running and computing results, but its results aren't actually controlling anything; they are only recorded to verify that its behavior is always the same as the old system given the same inputs.
Once you've thoroughly tested and debugged the behavior of the new system that way, you flip the switch so that now the new system is in control and the old system is merely having its results recorded. Let the system run that way for a period of time; if anything goes wrong you can always flip the switch back again. If nothing goes wrong, you can either leave the old system in place as an emergency backup (for as long as it lasts), or decommission it.
Re: Always online (Score:3)
Solid approach.
The only thing I'd add on is an arbitration node, to resolve, or at least record the instances where the systems' opinions ran into conflict.
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You are speaking sense; however, the people in charge have never had ANY direct experience with a reality that tells them no. They are completely incapable of leading a project like this and they will not give up enough control to allow anyone who could do it, to actually do it.
No. We are locked into permanent incompetence now. Look at the Secretary of Defense. ROFL.
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Industrial systems rarely use voltage for sending analogue signals, and digital signals are typically dry contact / high impedance. Yes you need to think about how to do this, but it's not an insurmountable issue.
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Not really. Many cities have upgraded their systems over time. As to the train signaling, that doesn't run directly on the machines in question. Rather they run on dedicated highly reliable certified controllers. The hardware behind it can be upgraded on the run and while operating systems in parallel without downtime. The more important issue is ... such an upgrade doesn't generate any profit or reduce any costs. EoL upgrades to control systems are universally blocked on financial constraints, not practica
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A couple years ago, we got a new General Manager who's a career civil engineer. He basically said there were two options. One, they could keep making minor repairs in the 4-5 hours they have overnight, and it would take something like 10 years to fix enough of the current problems
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Yet somehow Transport for London does it on infrastructure that's 150 years old and sometimes goes through tiny tunnels. Up until Covid, some individual stations had 100 million passengers per year, and some lines (e.g. Northern Line in 2019) carrying 340 million passengers per year. There are other cities with larger passenger numbers and more 24x7 lines, such as Moscow, that keep on top of things.
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I am sure it was more than up to the task, and with the robust lithographic processes used, electromigration was unlikely to ever be a problem.
Fun bit of historical perspective. Back when I was a lad, I had an internship at Raytheon. We were putting together a proposal for the Mode Select Beacon System, one of those transponder things which would allow controllers to see which planes were where. The back end was to be of the art. We were going to build a custom system based on mirrored 68020 processors (we got a few pre-release samples to play with) and a butterfly processor-to-processor interconnect and a purpose built OS.
I don't think Raytheon's
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Hey! How dare you not get on board with replacing drop-dead reliable with flavor-of-the-month bullshit manufactured to save every penny possible and have leaking capacitors in 5 years?
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I'm not necessarily seeing an issue with that given you're not talking about infrastructure but just a means to show information to passengers. If it works and it's not too much manpower to maintain it, just carry on until you have a problem repairing it.
This article is more about what keeps the planes in the sky. I'm not necessarily blessing the replacement (I would hope whatever they use is at least air-gapped from the Internet still, which is one benefit to using floppy disks I guess....) but the hardwar
How about this time (Score:2)
How about this time when designing the system the future upgrade-ability of the system is also factored into the plan. For now you can replace the diskette drives with Gotek USB floppy drive emulators to eliminate the actual floppy diskettes and use USB thumb drives instead.
Gotek (Score:3)
Simple solution much easier on the wallet.
What's wrong with paper strips? (Score:3)
Paper strips don't depend on anything to persist. What is the point of taking away a useful backup?
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A "backup" ceases being useful when it serves as a distraction to the primary system or limits the primary system. Think for example a backup that needs to be done daily in a way that consumes an hour of an IT person's time, while also not being physically large enough to handle the primary system. That's the IT analogy here.
Paper strips may be computer fault proof, but they are also manual and limit the amount of air traffic a system can handle. Your choice is to keep it, or digitise it away. Running both
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A "backup" ceases being useful when it serves as a distraction to the primary system or limits the primary system. Think for example a backup that needs to be done daily in a way that consumes an hour of an IT person's time, while also not being physically large enough to handle the primary system.
Cost of performing backups are independent of their value. It might suck, cost a lot of money or be a inconvenience perhaps unnecessarily so yet to assert cost of backups means a backup "cases being useful" is absurd on its face.
That's the IT analogy here.
Not only is the the analogy fundamentally misguided by confusing cost of backups with value of backups. You are also asserting the analogy is applicable without providing any reason or justification for that being the case.
Can you make a merit based argument specific to backup pa
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Transcription errors.
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Nothing. Paper strips have worked for decades. They will continue to work for decades. Unless this is hindering flights from taking off or landing they should continue to use paper strips.
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Get that desk fan out of here!!
The right question is... (Score:2)
Who is going to get rich from this? IBM? Microsoft? Someone is going to get a pay day.
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Then they'll fail to deliver on time, and get paid even more to finish it late.
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How to make money in government IT contracting:
1. Win contract for $$$
2. Wait 5-10 years
3. Report back that you failed.
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Who is going to get rich from this? IBM? Microsoft? Someone is going to get a pay day.
Hopefully the flying public, who will get a safer, more robust, and more predictable flights. We seem to always look at costs and never at benefits to the end consumer.
Alternatively, we could privatize ATC like like Canada and Europe, the bastions of state provision, and get an even cheaper and more robust system.
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You're way off.
Ransomware devs are most likely to get rich from this...
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My guess is Oracle. They're famous for taking on government work they have no idea how to actually do, and fucking it up for millions upon millions of dollars, and then getting in years-long lawsuits over it.
Can they get it right? (Score:2)
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You seem to assume that incumbent systems and technology do not have a service lifetime, and spare parts / replacement items will always be available.
Neither of those things are true.
Oh Floppy Disks!! (Score:2)
Mad respect to whoever remembers this without googling.
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No more floppy disks (Score:3)
We're leaping boldly into the future... moving the entire system to 100MB Zip Disks!
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Jazz Drive [wikipedia.org] surely (you're showing your age).
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(you're showing your age)
I do that quite regularly... and sometimes it's even intentional!
Re: No more floppy disks (Score:2)
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I vividly remember watching a segment on the evening news as a kid in the late 1990s where they were interviewing people in the grocery store about their stock investments. Someone triumphally declared "iomega is going to put my kids through college!" I think that was a few months before the .com crash.
ATC digistrips (Score:3)
I was once entranced with a French experiment that made digital analogs of the paper ATC strips, called Digistrips. It is *still* way cool. Found it again. Ah yes! It was Zinc, and TkZinc. Maybe someone should ask other countries what *they* use? Or what the navy uses.. something tells me they are digitized already. Anyway the pretty links for your reference.
https://github.com/asb-capfan/... [github.com]
http://doro.poltava.ua/tkzinc/... [poltava.ua]
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [researchgate.net]
https://www.researchgate.net/f... [researchgate.net]
https://www.researchgate.net/s... [researchgate.net]
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This is going to be interesting (Score:2)
Maybe this could be the spectacular failure that finally pushes IT to some level of actual quality. Windows for mission-critical things? The mind boggles...
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Leave it to AI (Score:2)
Let it crash a few planes to make the public aware of how unreliable AI is, and see the bubble burst.
Maybe unpopular opinion (Score:2)
While this likely saved them from the disastrous CrowdStrike outage that had a massive global impact
Exactly none of those endpoint security packages belong on anything safety critical.
Their remote management and monitoring features present single point attack surface, pop the management server and you likely have enough C&C to at least DOS-condition all the clients.
They potential break operations like filesystem access in potentially surprising ways that are difficult or impossible to do good defensive programing and error handling around.
They are only effective if updated frequently which means your
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100% correct.
I work on systems that end up on commercial aircraft. They are not flight-critical systems, but we still act like they are and mandate that updates only happen when the operator wants them, even if we release them whenever ready. They get to push the button. And in the meantime, every time the airplane is on the ground, it automatically backs up the configuration data off the aircraft, and that backup is verified before putting it into storage. Nobody has any form of privileges on the syste
Likely replaced with something containing malware (Score:2)
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I'm not saying that the replacement won't be worse, but floppy disks were always notorious for losing data and generally being unreliable. Despite SD cards having a notorious fault where leaving them unused for a year or so can result in data loss, I've lost far less data from SD cards than I ever did floppies.
I think there can be a happy medium here where the replacement is airgapped and based upon reliable, serviceable, modern hardware, the question is whether that's what's going to happen.
Its a lot more than floppy discs (Score:2)
Yeah, baby! (Score:2)
Connect all of the air traffic control systems to the internet. What could go wrong?
To be replaced by... (Score:2)
Syquest cartridges.