I worked on modernization in the FAA specifically around digitizing NOTAMs.
I would urge you not to consider this modernization from the perspective you may be familiar, as someone who may work on the bleeding edge and sometimes sees a lack of caution from engineers pushing for change.
The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.
One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.
I get the idea that the current administration is pushing safety to the side, but there is another risk where safety becomes a blocker to reasonable change.
When I left that work (more than 15 years ago) it was clearly a blocker.
This isn't like COBOL. Floppy disc were never reliable. They should've been phased out a long time ago
Magnetic degradation, wear from read/write heads, and environmental sensitivity mean disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long. And they are also easy to corrupt from all kinds of magnetic sources around us.
I get other stuff, even DOS like system. Safety critical software/hardware that was battle tested makes sense. Not floppy. Sometime it's just bureaucracy.
>The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.
If this is the case, why was an airport knocked offline due to a cut fiber optic? A safety focused system would have a backup system say satellite or mobile 4G/5G. But they didn't have such.
This isn't about safety. Its about bureaucracy wrapped up as safety.
There was a third system, the fallback they used to prevent loss of life, legacy systems and a system shutdown.
You can argue thats not a sufficient third redundancy, I don't have enough context to throw an opinion out there on the safety of this particular infrastructure project.
I am confident that the fallback process was considered and kept in place as the tertiary backup.
Excellent point though. It took me some thinking to put myself back in SRM mindset and what they'd have considered here.
> Which is why many systems on most airliners are redundant in threes
Not really. Triplex redundancy is based on a failure model where failures can produce arbitrary output. Three systems allows majority voting (often, median select) to provide correct output in the presence of a single arbitrary failure. It allows detection of double-fail-silent failures and uncorrelated double failures, but that's not really the point, since continued operation under these conditions is at risk, and failing nonoperational isn't often acceptable for these systems. (You'll also see quadruplex systems that use the same voting mechanism to detect and disable failed channels, allowing handling two arbitrary non-simultaneous failures, for systems that need a longer window of continued operation after failure.)
If you change the failure modes, you change the architecture. These days you often see dual-dual systems where each pair of systems cross-checks and disables itself on mismatch, converting a single arbitrary failure to a single silent failure; which then allows downstream systems to accept inputs from two such fail-silent systems and trust either that is providing output, removing the need for a median select.
The presence of bureaucracy doesn't mean safety isn't the main consideration, it also isn't a given that bureaucracy is a negative in this instance. The safety record speaks for itself: you are safer in a commercial airplane than just about anywhere else you can go.
But moving faster and without accountability is generally worse.
In a perfect world, we would move at a steady pace, as to keep up with the world but without rushing, and people would be accountable without a heavy bureaucratic processes.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works in practice, at least not for long, so between the two, we usually favor the slow and bureaucratic process when safety and reliability matter.
In fact, it's created a bunch of risks. Like the fact that nobody manufacturers floppy disks or floppy disk readers anymore.
I can understand not changing a system for change sake, but the floppy disk has been obsolete for nearly 20 years now. It's been hard to find a floppy disk reader for the last 10 years. Going so slow that you can't respond to that change is far FAR too slow.
I worked for a salesforce partner and we spent the two years I was there working with a large ag equipment manufacturer. They had two legacy systems that were still (as I was told) some combination of Fortran and early Unix systems. They had been reluctant to upgrade them because one of the their main manufacturing machines was still running on it and they were terrified if they upgraded and something went wrong, it would cost them millions in production time.
As you pointed out, you can't find floppy discs or disc manufacturers any more. I do remember one of the VP's of this company saying as long as they keep teaching Fortran to college engineers, they have no reason to upgrade yet. That got a few raised eyebrows from our team. We relented and upgraded what they were comfortable with - but man oh man it was quite the eye opener for me as a young dev how the thought processes of the people running these companies really are.
As long as those manufacturing systems were air-gapped and working, I can understand being conservative with changes. Of course at some point you're at risk of hardware failures too, for things that are likely NLA.
> Of course at some point you're at risk of hardware failures too, for things that are likely NLA.
Yeah, that's really the biggest issue with these systems. Were I one of these manufacturers I'd invest in getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware. The last thing they'll want to deal with is that their software was written for Sun Spark and that no longer exists.
That said, hard to go wrong porting over the x86 at this point.
Yeah, that's what I'd have expected especially because I believe the USB mass media standard was part of the original standard. You'd need no special drivers to work with a modern USB thumb drive even if you are dealing with windows 98 (Win95 had usb support, but I believe you still had to install the drivers for it).
Yup, it can create a situation where you have a huge incentive towards workarounds and hacky fixes because doing it properly incurs huge costs. This is especially bad when a fundamentally quite bad design makes it through certification (most processes don't really prevent this).
Presumably such a confident assertion is based on sufficient actual experience with slower safety protocols such that you can state, positively, that faster-moving processes produce safer, human-life critical, systems... ?
You really, really need to work in industrials controls before your opinion carries weight on this - there are plenty of 40 year old systems humming along keeping the world turning that are bulletproof reliable.
'Move fast and break things' is fine when the result of failure is someone failing to make a billion dollars at their IPO. It's not acceptable in the world where failure means dams break, reactors go supercritical, planes collide, or other similarly apocalyptic scenarios.
You may recall we went on an orgy of firing federal workers and cutting “waste fraud and abuse”. That impacted engineering, operations and boring jobs like finance and contracts. After the helicopter / airliner collision in DC they accelerated a bunch of stuff to show fire and motion.
Backhoes can disrupt connections, but so can failures to pay bills.
Systems like the radar in question often cannot work with broadband and satellite links.
Engineering will not save you from incompetent governance.
This is great. Question was, did you folks consider simply replacing these with Goteks and / or testing something just a bit more reliable while digitizing these NOTAMs?
> The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.
In one role, I worked on writing software for drones.
That very rigorous process was very reassurring to me. Reasonable progress was absolutely occurring.
> One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.
What kind of risks were you looking at with what kinds of balances, if you're able to share?
Thanks for clarifying! I also really liked the SRM process.
Insomuch as people protecting their jobs: that's always a thing. But I honestly felt that people wanted to protect their jobs because they wanted to protect the public. Some people definitely wanted to keep their work and personal life separate with solid 9-to-5 boundaries. That's perfectly OK too. It was helpful to be inclusive of them even if their time was already filled.
I worked with numerous people who didn't understand all of the components or systems. We took it upon ourselves to be very open to questions and to thoroughly explain how each thing works. I've found if someone had good understanding of one component but didn't understand another component, it was very useful to schedule time with them to walk through the components they didn't understand to try to alleviate their concerns. They might not know what questions to ask, so I would instead ask questions about their well-known components to try to understand and correlate to newer components. Perhaps their concerns were even justified but they didn't know how to articulate them!
The SV (silicon valley) motto of fail fast and break things accelerated evolution of software design systems. Can you imagine what would happen if people were hesitant to use Git works because a merge could break something? Lol.
But this kind of precaution is quite necessary in the development of AI systems. Current regulations have turned a blind eye to accelerate software and AI progress. Now we have security bugs and misalignments, and we will have AI misalignments as well.
Knowing how computing landscape has changed in SV, I can't imagine modern day SV helping fix FAA systems. Alternatively we could go with multiple incarnations of the same system, being battle tested and proven with independent concurrences, alongside current FAA system. Yeah, it is a boatload of money, and probably wasting 90 percent of it in redundancy.
> Can you imagine what would happen if people were hesitant to use Git works because a merge could break something? Lol.
Version control was always something that was adopted more by process-heavy organizations until the popularization of GitHub. Before that, it was common for the move-fast type of developers to eschew version control.
Earlier in my career, people didn't bother with the chore of using version control unless they were working on an important project that demanded it.
Famously it already broke out of containment many times and used exploits to illegally access and manipulate remote systems. Is this not enough for you? The fact that the target of the attack wasn't critical infrastructure is only a matter of circumstance.
Rules and regulations in aviation are written in blood. Moving fast is not a virtue when the industry is already as safe as it is. Even if the change is to something objectively better with no drawbacks, the act of change itself creates risk for accidents.
Basically when accident rates are already very low, even a small amount of transitional risk can add up to offset years of marginal improvements. So the burden of proof rests heavily on the proposer of change to a system that already is working reliably.
Agreed. If the floppy system fulfills it's purpose safely, why switch for the sake of it? New stuff can be better, when it's better integrated or even if it's just easier to use (less errors) but old tech in and of itself isn't bad.
> I get the idea that the current administration is pushing safety to the side
Can you provide any examples you've come across where the current administration has pushed safety to the side with respect to the FAA? I'm curious to read about those. I know there have been some changes to regulations and there are sometimes disagreements around those but I'm not sure if the ones I've seen (which aren't comprehensive) would be considered pushing safety to the side.
in your opinion, what would be the most intellectually honest comparison? aviation in Europe or China? it would seem that a lot of shortages / pressures are artificial, in the sense that they are created purposefully by a political process.
we can look at this more holistically than a specific IT project. like in china, which is not a place i want to live, it is still valid to say, their process of steamrolling past local interests means that airport expansion and transit to new airports can be built quickly, which helps meet demand for air travel better than working at the absolute limits of safety and efficiency tradeoffs.
local control in the US infests everything. it causes airports to be too small, guilds to grow too slowly, it opposes infrastructure, it makes politicians too vulnerable and too weak to make changes that upset minor but powerful real estate interests.
so in one POV, safety is a blocker to reasonable change, but everywhere else in the world, they just increase capacity, and the huge stresses on safety limits are reduced.
More information needed. Was this a sneakernet? No one thought of replacing with a floppy emulator and SD cards? All of the data can fit into 1.44MB?
If the last one is true, devs take note. If FAA can rely on slow, small storage for safety critical applications, you probably can reduce the resource requirements for your app and improve your customers’ experience and extend the life of their hardware.
There’s been an incredible expansion of computer hardware and networking in every dimension since the heyday of the floppy. And the floppy itself was a huge step up from technology of even a few years prior.
Your comment could have been made in any year since 1950, and it would have been both correct and irrelevant outside the areas most resistant to hardware upgrades. FAA is conservative, and should be, but the rest of us have supercomputers in our pockets.
Have software developers abused the hardware capabilities they have been granted? Of course they have. I’d love to see some care put into that. But beyond the basics, hand-twiddled hyperoptimizations are now an exercise for craftspeople. Or…AI?
Aha so that answers my question about why they haven't at least switched to USB thumb drives for their sneakernet. These aren't PCs. Probably minicomputers such as a TI-990 or similar. They don't have USB ports.
Remember, this is the government we're talking about. That system was likely being worked on from 1980s to 1990s before itactually went in to implementation phase in 1990s.
Kind of makes sense for the time given hardware was evolving so rapidly after Apple and MS brought PCs to the masses; a solution deployed in 1980 was out of date by 1981.
Workers of the day were used to paper first routines; PCs on every desk were not common until the 90s when home computers, like phones in 2026, hit a fast enough for most tasks in an office constant upgrades are not necessary.
I feel like people under a certain age don't really understand this.
While we see improvements in hardware and software today, it's NOTHING like the late 80's and 90's. Our first home pc was out of date in less than a year (thank you for that recommendation, Tiger Direct). As a child, I couldn't run games that came out more than about 10-12 months after we upgraded our machine. It really was stunning to be a part of.
And now my home pc is about 4 years old, and replaced a machine that was 9. I plan to run this one for at least another 6 or 7 years unless something amazing happens that nobody sees coming.
If you didn't upgrade often, it could happen that you bought a new machine that was 10x as fast as the old one. It was just incredible how fast everything was after such an upgrade. A 486-66 to a Celeron-416 (common overclock at the time) in my case. The 486-66 was a year or two old for me - I had fished board and CPU out of the trash somewhere because before that I had a 486-33 bought in '94.
The politically grandstanding is gross. From what I can tell E-IDS has been in development since at least 2020 with a planned rollout starting in 2025.
Unfortunately web search has gotten so bad that it's hard to find past information about it.
Do they? or is it low quality media? Rather than judging old tech bad, new tech good we should look at the requirements and tradeoffs. The failure modes of the new replacement system look more catastrophic to me, relying on cloud infra and internet links.
I can't find information about how the disks are used specifically, how often they are read, written, what data they are used for, if they can be replaced by floppy emulators, etc.
12 billion for a new system that might not actually be an improvement is a lot of money.
I have some 3.5" floppy disks in the bench seat of the electric organ that came with my house that are at least that old... the three I tried worked without issue. Small sample size, but it suggests a half-life way over a couple of years; I can't imagine this system has unusually robust error correction or anything.
I never had a bad sector on 5.25-inch Double-sided, Double-Density (360K) diskettes, but I did all the time with 3.5-inch HD ones (1.44MB). I'm seeing some references to 8-inch and some to 3.5-inch disks used in the FAA, but I'm not sure what source has reliable information about that.
You've found the positive side to the fact that our government with budgets for all the money in the world can't seem to stay within 30 years of up to date technically.
If we give them more money, this is sure to improve! Monopolies and all ...
Micro-services with docker running out of a kubernetes compliant blockchain with somewhere some "AI" added in the mix. I guess this news is more for PR than anything else because I don't see how the replacement of 69% of copper wire is meaningful in any way. What copper wires? Where? Is it because you removed landlines and replaced with voip?
>The FAA cited an October 13 event where a fiber optic cable connecting Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport to the FAA’s network was cut outside an airport gate, leading to the loss of data services between FAA facilities and requiring a ground stop.
Do they seriously not have a backup connection? I would have expected them to have a backup stelite or maybe even a 4G/5G mobile data system in place.
If I can use my phone as a Hotspot when Comcast is doing some service so I can work, I don't understand what idiot designed an airport without backup connections.
Useful aphorism in general, not terribly applicable in this case. Even if it had been tested regularly, it was cut around the same time the primary failed. Regular testing doesn't stop construction crews from cutting a line.
A more useful comment might have been to say something about the depth of the backup, having only one backup connection not being enough or something.
> I don't understand what idiot designed an airport without backup connections.
I have literally spraypainted the pavement and wall - "One fibre goes here, and down on the corner there, the other fibre goes there" - just to ensure a good separation of routes. I want the pinch point to be within the rack that the routers sit in.
That airport did have two redundant connections, this was a swiss cheese failure where one was under maintenance and the other was severed by an independent event.
I have a bad feeling that this is not going to end well. Especially given that this administration is... Rather incompetent. I hope that safety is like number one on their list of priorities but somehow I doubt it
> Engineers of today aren't better than engineers of yesterday
Our ability to wield technology has gone up, while our ability to engineer and understand that technology (as a whole) has gone down.
Age should be the most suspect of arguments against the design of a system. Enumerate specifically its flaws and not just that it is old. System design doesn't wear out, it is abstract, like mathematics.
I agree, nothing says poor priorities like upgrading the air traffic control system. It removes the opportunity for graft, only supports the monied elite who can afford to fly and don't care about climate change, and diminishes the opportunities for crises to exploit.
Instead, the United States government should have continued the policies and values that led to Next Gen, ERAM, STARS, and AAS.
what do you mean. a lot of poor people fly as well. I won't would even risk to say that poor people fly more often. For example migrant workers flying lets say Bulgaria-Ireland every few months
I don't want the FAA to make changes at "lightning speed" or "rapidly moving to make upgrades" or "record pace". Safety must be further down the list for these guys.
I've worked on systems this decade that still relied on floppy disks. It's getting harder and harder for them to operate because the disks are getting rarer, as are the drives. And often the essential component is not the disk itself. There are some other computers in the system that cannot be upgraded to any more recent device, systems from the 1980s and 1990s that force them to continue using a floppy disk.
If it was just two modern computers and transferring data between them, the floppy disk would have been dropped in a heartbeat. But it's the old computers still in the critical path that are holding everything back. And those are really hard to maintain. Last year we phased out a system that was dependent on computers from the mid-1990s, getting replacement parts was practically impossible, they mostly just don't exist. You'd buy old systems off ebay and hope that they had enough working parts to scavenge, and the right working parts.
EDIT: Light editing because I had some extra words.
It's both time tested and at risk of ripping at the seams. Floppy disks and the mechanisms still wear. And because neither are still made, the chances of a zero population scenario happening is greater every year.
It's better to test a replacement while you still have the time, than to risk rushing something else.
Fortunately the choice isn't between 1980s hardware with floppy disk requirements and rented servers in someone else's building. There are a lot of options in between those two.
In my carreer I have seen plenty of system integrations working on ftp'ing request response documents to file folders on "SaaS" systems while the SV boys were considering SOAP obsolete and overnight Cobol and RPG mainframes document sincs while they were waxing about microservises and noSQL.
> The greatest nation in the world deserves a state-of-the-art air traffic control system, and under President Trump, we’re delivering just that
They are signalling Trumps involvement so I will assume it must be another vanity project he wants to stamp his name on. I look forward to hundreds of grounded planes due to cloud based weather reporting not being available because of a borked server update or misconfigured wifi adapter.
why is this "historic"? the thirst for this admin to use the most bombastic language possible is so tiring.
Just... modernize the thing already. thats your job. It's not impressive that you did this. You're supposed to do this. You dont get extra kudos for doing the thing you signed up to do...
and dont forget to put Trump's name at the beginning. Or he might get cranky
Everything they try to spin positively has to be 'historic' because:
1. The party leader is a fragile, dying narcissist who is desperate for his name to be attached to anything other than the misery he's inflicted upon the world.
2. Their _actual_ historic achievements are all war crimes, human rights violations, and policy changes that would terrify their average supporter if they actually understood the long-term consequences.
The inability to keep the air traffic control system effective and maintainable is far more embarrassing than the inability to update the IRS software or build a high-speed rail.
I would urge you not to consider this modernization from the perspective you may be familiar, as someone who may work on the bleeding edge and sometimes sees a lack of caution from engineers pushing for change.
The FAAs safety risk management is built around a rigorous process, but that is also a massive slowdown to reasonable progress.
One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.
I get the idea that the current administration is pushing safety to the side, but there is another risk where safety becomes a blocker to reasonable change.
When I left that work (more than 15 years ago) it was clearly a blocker.
Magnetic degradation, wear from read/write heads, and environmental sensitivity mean disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long. And they are also easy to corrupt from all kinds of magnetic sources around us.
I get other stuff, even DOS like system. Safety critical software/hardware that was battle tested makes sense. Not floppy. Sometime it's just bureaucracy.
If this is the case, why was an airport knocked offline due to a cut fiber optic? A safety focused system would have a backup system say satellite or mobile 4G/5G. But they didn't have such.
This isn't about safety. Its about bureaucracy wrapped up as safety.
There were two independent systems.
You can argue thats not a sufficient third redundancy, I don't have enough context to throw an opinion out there on the safety of this particular infrastructure project.
I am confident that the fallback process was considered and kept in place as the tertiary backup.
Excellent point though. It took me some thinking to put myself back in SRM mindset and what they'd have considered here.
Not really. Triplex redundancy is based on a failure model where failures can produce arbitrary output. Three systems allows majority voting (often, median select) to provide correct output in the presence of a single arbitrary failure. It allows detection of double-fail-silent failures and uncorrelated double failures, but that's not really the point, since continued operation under these conditions is at risk, and failing nonoperational isn't often acceptable for these systems. (You'll also see quadruplex systems that use the same voting mechanism to detect and disable failed channels, allowing handling two arbitrary non-simultaneous failures, for systems that need a longer window of continued operation after failure.)
If you change the failure modes, you change the architecture. These days you often see dual-dual systems where each pair of systems cross-checks and disables itself on mismatch, converting a single arbitrary failure to a single silent failure; which then allows downstream systems to accept inputs from two such fail-silent systems and trust either that is providing output, removing the need for a median select.
In a perfect world, we would move at a steady pace, as to keep up with the world but without rushing, and people would be accountable without a heavy bureaucratic processes.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works in practice, at least not for long, so between the two, we usually favor the slow and bureaucratic process when safety and reliability matter.
I can understand not changing a system for change sake, but the floppy disk has been obsolete for nearly 20 years now. It's been hard to find a floppy disk reader for the last 10 years. Going so slow that you can't respond to that change is far FAR too slow.
As you pointed out, you can't find floppy discs or disc manufacturers any more. I do remember one of the VP's of this company saying as long as they keep teaching Fortran to college engineers, they have no reason to upgrade yet. That got a few raised eyebrows from our team. We relented and upgraded what they were comfortable with - but man oh man it was quite the eye opener for me as a young dev how the thought processes of the people running these companies really are.
As long as those manufacturing systems were air-gapped and working, I can understand being conservative with changes. Of course at some point you're at risk of hardware failures too, for things that are likely NLA.
Yeah, that's really the biggest issue with these systems. Were I one of these manufacturers I'd invest in getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware. The last thing they'll want to deal with is that their software was written for Sun Spark and that no longer exists.
That said, hard to go wrong porting over the x86 at this point.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVHEFiLQ3GU
But creating a bureaucracy doesn't mean you've created a rigorous process to ensure safety.
'Move fast and break things' is fine when the result of failure is someone failing to make a billion dollars at their IPO. It's not acceptable in the world where failure means dams break, reactors go supercritical, planes collide, or other similarly apocalyptic scenarios.
Backhoes can disrupt connections, but so can failures to pay bills.
Systems like the radar in question often cannot work with broadband and satellite links.
Engineering will not save you from incompetent governance.
In one role, I worked on writing software for drones.
That very rigorous process was very reassurring to me. Reasonable progress was absolutely occurring.
> One of the eng I worked with was 80+ years old and just didnt want to retire. He did not understand modern systems at all and the risks we were looking at were not (imo) realistically balanced.
What kind of risks were you looking at with what kinds of balances, if you're able to share?
The SRM board knew the legacy system but much less the modern one. Its hard to compare safety when you only clearly understand one systems safeguards.
I appreciate the process being there but at the time it felt much more like (some) people protecting their jobs than the public.
The risks I felt were overblown (iirc) were around likelihood of catastrophic failure in the system.
I actually loved the overall process and it informed how I look at software, it was the application of the process that bothered me.
Insomuch as people protecting their jobs: that's always a thing. But I honestly felt that people wanted to protect their jobs because they wanted to protect the public. Some people definitely wanted to keep their work and personal life separate with solid 9-to-5 boundaries. That's perfectly OK too. It was helpful to be inclusive of them even if their time was already filled.
I worked with numerous people who didn't understand all of the components or systems. We took it upon ourselves to be very open to questions and to thoroughly explain how each thing works. I've found if someone had good understanding of one component but didn't understand another component, it was very useful to schedule time with them to walk through the components they didn't understand to try to alleviate their concerns. They might not know what questions to ask, so I would instead ask questions about their well-known components to try to understand and correlate to newer components. Perhaps their concerns were even justified but they didn't know how to articulate them!
Iirc there were 1 or 2 people who could hold the process up and were not open to persuasion.
I was also young and less equipped to handle that.
I worked in a few other spaces and liked a slightly more balanced approach.
Silicon Valley style approach is not what id strive for at the FAA. I dont think that is the extreme they have swung to either.
But this kind of precaution is quite necessary in the development of AI systems. Current regulations have turned a blind eye to accelerate software and AI progress. Now we have security bugs and misalignments, and we will have AI misalignments as well.
Knowing how computing landscape has changed in SV, I can't imagine modern day SV helping fix FAA systems. Alternatively we could go with multiple incarnations of the same system, being battle tested and proven with independent concurrences, alongside current FAA system. Yeah, it is a boatload of money, and probably wasting 90 percent of it in redundancy.
Version control was always something that was adopted more by process-heavy organizations until the popularization of GitHub. Before that, it was common for the move-fast type of developers to eschew version control.
Earlier in my career, people didn't bother with the chore of using version control unless they were working on an important project that demanded it.
Basically when accident rates are already very low, even a small amount of transitional risk can add up to offset years of marginal improvements. So the burden of proof rests heavily on the proposer of change to a system that already is working reliably.
Can you provide any examples you've come across where the current administration has pushed safety to the side with respect to the FAA? I'm curious to read about those. I know there have been some changes to regulations and there are sometimes disagreements around those but I'm not sure if the ones I've seen (which aren't comprehensive) would be considered pushing safety to the side.
we can look at this more holistically than a specific IT project. like in china, which is not a place i want to live, it is still valid to say, their process of steamrolling past local interests means that airport expansion and transit to new airports can be built quickly, which helps meet demand for air travel better than working at the absolute limits of safety and efficiency tradeoffs.
local control in the US infests everything. it causes airports to be too small, guilds to grow too slowly, it opposes infrastructure, it makes politicians too vulnerable and too weak to make changes that upset minor but powerful real estate interests.
so in one POV, safety is a blocker to reasonable change, but everywhere else in the world, they just increase capacity, and the huge stresses on safety limits are reduced.
If the last one is true, devs take note. If FAA can rely on slow, small storage for safety critical applications, you probably can reduce the resource requirements for your app and improve your customers’ experience and extend the life of their hardware.
There’s been an incredible expansion of computer hardware and networking in every dimension since the heyday of the floppy. And the floppy itself was a huge step up from technology of even a few years prior.
Your comment could have been made in any year since 1950, and it would have been both correct and irrelevant outside the areas most resistant to hardware upgrades. FAA is conservative, and should be, but the rest of us have supercomputers in our pockets.
Have software developers abused the hardware capabilities they have been granted? Of course they have. I’d love to see some care put into that. But beyond the basics, hand-twiddled hyperoptimizations are now an exercise for craftspeople. Or…AI?
Another article with some more details: https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-faa-is-still-using-floppy-dis...
I know they are saying IDS-4 is a "1980s" system, but it appears IDS-4 was actually developed in the early 1990s; it uses MS-DOS and 3.5 inch floppies: https://sysatl.com/systems-atlanta-inc-awarded-faa-ids4-sust...
Workers of the day were used to paper first routines; PCs on every desk were not common until the 90s when home computers, like phones in 2026, hit a fast enough for most tasks in an office constant upgrades are not necessary.
There was a lot of ducks to align back then.
While we see improvements in hardware and software today, it's NOTHING like the late 80's and 90's. Our first home pc was out of date in less than a year (thank you for that recommendation, Tiger Direct). As a child, I couldn't run games that came out more than about 10-12 months after we upgraded our machine. It really was stunning to be a part of.
And now my home pc is about 4 years old, and replaced a machine that was 9. I plan to run this one for at least another 6 or 7 years unless something amazing happens that nobody sees coming.
Unfortunately web search has gotten so bad that it's hard to find past information about it.
I can't find information about how the disks are used specifically, how often they are read, written, what data they are used for, if they can be replaced by floppy emulators, etc.
12 billion for a new system that might not actually be an improvement is a lot of money.
I never had a bad sector on 5.25-inch Double-sided, Double-Density (360K) diskettes, but I did all the time with 3.5-inch HD ones (1.44MB). I'm seeing some references to 8-inch and some to 3.5-inch disks used in the FAA, but I'm not sure what source has reliable information about that.
If we give them more money, this is sure to improve! Monopolies and all ...
What does this even… mean?
¡much confidence. fly yes!
https://sysatl.com/ids4/
https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/library-items/FA...
Do they seriously not have a backup connection? I would have expected them to have a backup stelite or maybe even a 4G/5G mobile data system in place.
If I can use my phone as a Hotspot when Comcast is doing some service so I can work, I don't understand what idiot designed an airport without backup connections.
That was the backup connection. The primary failed, and concurrently the backup had been severed by a construction crew.
A more useful comment might have been to say something about the depth of the backup, having only one backup connection not being enough or something.
I have literally spraypainted the pavement and wall - "One fibre goes here, and down on the corner there, the other fibre goes there" - just to ensure a good separation of routes. I want the pinch point to be within the rack that the routers sit in.
I don't get why an airport can't do similar.
So they didnt have a redundant connection. They had 1 live one that was severed.
Engineers of today aren't better than engineers of yesterday, they just have access to new technology (and new footguns).
I'd rather have a well-designed legacy system that does the job well, than an incompetently designed "modernized" system that doesn't.
Our ability to wield technology has gone up, while our ability to engineer and understand that technology (as a whole) has gone down.
Age should be the most suspect of arguments against the design of a system. Enumerate specifically its flaws and not just that it is old. System design doesn't wear out, it is abstract, like mathematics.
Instead, the United States government should have continued the policies and values that led to Next Gen, ERAM, STARS, and AAS.
If it was just two modern computers and transferring data between them, the floppy disk would have been dropped in a heartbeat. But it's the old computers still in the critical path that are holding everything back. And those are really hard to maintain. Last year we phased out a system that was dependent on computers from the mid-1990s, getting replacement parts was practically impossible, they mostly just don't exist. You'd buy old systems off ebay and hope that they had enough working parts to scavenge, and the right working parts.
EDIT: Light editing because I had some extra words.
It's better to test a replacement while you still have the time, than to risk rushing something else.
This one, where the tour stops are ATC data buildings, where they only stop in to swap out floppy disks for USB drives.
They are signalling Trumps involvement so I will assume it must be another vanity project he wants to stamp his name on. I look forward to hundreds of grounded planes due to cloud based weather reporting not being available because of a borked server update or misconfigured wifi adapter.
Another trump tell… Lame acronym.
Just... modernize the thing already. thats your job. It's not impressive that you did this. You're supposed to do this. You dont get extra kudos for doing the thing you signed up to do...
and dont forget to put Trump's name at the beginning. Or he might get cranky
1. The party leader is a fragile, dying narcissist who is desperate for his name to be attached to anything other than the misery he's inflicted upon the world.
2. Their _actual_ historic achievements are all war crimes, human rights violations, and policy changes that would terrify their average supporter if they actually understood the long-term consequences.
The inability to keep the air traffic control system effective and maintainable is far more embarrassing than the inability to update the IRS software or build a high-speed rail.