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 me complain you about how error-prone and unreliable are real floppy disks. ):
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 I think they've all been replaced by now, but I can't say that with 100% certainty.
I get that FAA hardware/software is a time-tested, safety-critical system that has resisted many prior modernization efforts but...how do other countries run their systems? Surely they're not all using floppies. I doubt there are many (any?) countries with a flight volume like the US but overall, flight safety is pretty good world-wide (again, with exceptions).
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 systems du if they need extreme uptime. Starting that effort now is ok but I would guess it would be take at leas a couple of years. Significant work would have to understand in detail what the current system does and does not do, and then map out what a system should do.
The problem is all of the big software consultancy services are optimized to maximize revenues / minimize their own risk when working with big / dumb government agencies.
The latest "Last Week Tonight" episode on Air Traffic Controllers is quite interesting. Learned about the floppy discs there.
I get having to use old software, but why did they pick Windows 95 and not NT, which is more robust?
Would you like to trust your life win95 and floppies definitely no but paper strips is something really robust and in light of crowd-strike or the outage in Newark I think a truly independent backup ‚system‘ is a good idea. Particularly as the next system will come with some early bugs.
> While this likely saved them from the disastrous CrowdStrike outage that had a massive global impact
I imagine log4j wasn't a problem either.
I am surprised Elon didn’t want to automate air traffic control before unsupervised fsd.
So what does a modern ATC look like?
can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?
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.
What's the actual problem with floppy disks? Is the system not performing the task it was designed for?
That is a long lonely road these floppies have been kicked down.
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> 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.