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 I think they've all been replaced by now, but I can't say that with 100% certainty.
ThinkBeat · 1h ago
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.
HPsquared · 1h ago
I wonder if anyone makes a virtual floppy drive that replicates the performance characteristics. I.e. to avoid a faster virtual drive uncovering dormant race conditions. Something like a developer assuming "I have enough time to do this processing before the disc makes another rotation" etc.
DocTomoe · 54m ago
We IT folks tend to quickly propose solutions to systems whose complexities we do not completely understand. That's fine when it is about serving ads or managing book orders. It's not ok when the stakes are high.
Virtualization just adds another layer of complexity to an already fragile system which literally thousands of human lives depend on every day. Adding more complexity is not a neutral act here, but neglectful manslaughter waiting to happen. Aviation is a low-tech, never-touch-a-running-system, risk-averse environment for a reason.
Floppies were useful because you could easily take them and take them to another, secondary, sometimes air gapped backup system. Replacing this functionality means replicating not just the data transfer, but also the safety architecture - which includes physical isolation and manual fallback paths. To recreate, the best chance would probably be something like storing the relevant info on thumb drives - but then you have whole new family of attack vectors by hostile forces (anyone still remember Stuxnet), which floppies did not have in that form?
And then there's the pesky aspect of international interoperability. One country alone cannot just storm forward. We are looking at decades of upgrades and alignments here. And that process already is underway. But proposing a radical change without acknowledging the full scope of what that entails - from certification cycles to human factors to geopolitical coordination - is not progress, it’s hubris.
jiggawatts · 33m ago
Eeeeexcept that floppies are horrifically unreliable. I remember feeding disk number 27 out of 33 only to get a "bad sector" error an hour into a software install. I'm still salty about that one.
"It's not broken" is the cry of the bad manager that hasn't done the proper analysis, hasn't actually looked at the pros and cons, but has simply become complacent and comfortable with the devil they know.
If they're still using physical floppies, then their process is broken now, so virtualising it will almost certainly un-break it.
A simple "clarifier" for this kind of thought process that I like to use is: If you were already using the new option (virtualised legacy hardware), would you think it a good idea to convert it to using open drives with convenient dust ingress, non-existent support and supply chain, glacially slow mechanical moving parts, and hilariously antiquated crunching noises for all data access? Would you? Really? Or would you recoil in horror at the very idea?
I use the same kind of logic on people who think staying on Windows Server 2012 in <current year> is a good idea. Would you downgrade Windows Server 2025 to 2012? Why not? You think it's a great platform, apparently!
PS: I worked on a large scale DOS-era software virtualisation project where we moved ~20K users onto a Windows + Citrix platform. We eliminated about 6000 floppy drives and about a million(!) tapes, and the resulting system was so much faster and reliable than the original that people were trying to bribe the project manager to be put at the front of the migration queue.
burnt-resistor · 3h ago
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. ):
skissane · 1h ago
> 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.
Yes, but if it is just a PC running Windows 95, likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, or if worst comes to worst, keep Windows 95 and stick it in a VM. I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else.
The use case where physical floppy emulators really shine is with much more exotic legacy systems. Some years ago there was a furore that the US nuclear arsenal was still being managed using 8-inch floppy disks (used in IBM Series/1s, 16-bit minicomputers from the 1970s). USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, but I suspect they kept the Series/1 minicomputers and just replaced the 8-inch floppy drives with hardware emulators (which probably each cost an utter fortune when you add up the premiums anyone will charge for it being the military, being highly classified, and above all being related to glowing things that go boom)
looofooo0 · 1h ago
I guess these hardware emulators are quite cheap on aliexpress, but then obivously for anything critical...
latexr · 2h ago
> 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.
sverhagen · 1h ago
Yeah, couldn't this easily split in a group supporting the FAA to implement a better system, versus a group trying to contract it out to the private sector? Before you know it, IBM* is printing money again. (* substitute with Evil Corp of your choosing)
eviks · 1h ago
Of course, that's why he had to say those words in the first place
latexr · 56m ago
And then what? Those words mean nothing to the people with the most power and motivation (or lack of care) to derail the whole thing.
It’s about as effective as placing a monkey in a porcelain shop then walking away while commenting loudly “Now now, it is very important none of the porcelain breaks, everyone knows it must remain intact”. The monkey doesn’t give a shit.
Butchering a proverb: “The best time to reorganise your porcelain store was before you bought a monkey. The second best time is after you sell the monkey.”
eviks · 50m ago
And then nothing? Do you seriously expect people to only say words that are effective at changing the world?
latexr · 34m ago
I sincerely don’t even know what you’re talking about right now. But it definitely isn’t related to my original argument. My point was about the task and the right time to tackle it, while you seem to be hung up on the words of the Secretary. The words are immaterial to this practical matter, as is any vague general concept of “changing the world”. I’m talking about this specific case, not building a philosophical thesis on the subject of improving humanity.
heisenbit · 2h ago
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.
jeffreygoesto · 2h ago
The latest "Last Week Tonight" episode on Air Traffic Controllers is quite interesting. Learned about the floppy discs there.
jessekv · 2h ago
> While this likely saved them from the disastrous CrowdStrike outage that had a massive global impact
I imagine log4j wasn't a problem either.
tsuru · 2h ago
So what does a modern ATC look like?
can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?
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.
Virtualization just adds another layer of complexity to an already fragile system which literally thousands of human lives depend on every day. Adding more complexity is not a neutral act here, but neglectful manslaughter waiting to happen. Aviation is a low-tech, never-touch-a-running-system, risk-averse environment for a reason.
Floppies were useful because you could easily take them and take them to another, secondary, sometimes air gapped backup system. Replacing this functionality means replicating not just the data transfer, but also the safety architecture - which includes physical isolation and manual fallback paths. To recreate, the best chance would probably be something like storing the relevant info on thumb drives - but then you have whole new family of attack vectors by hostile forces (anyone still remember Stuxnet), which floppies did not have in that form?
And then there's the pesky aspect of international interoperability. One country alone cannot just storm forward. We are looking at decades of upgrades and alignments here. And that process already is underway. But proposing a radical change without acknowledging the full scope of what that entails - from certification cycles to human factors to geopolitical coordination - is not progress, it’s hubris.
"It's not broken" is the cry of the bad manager that hasn't done the proper analysis, hasn't actually looked at the pros and cons, but has simply become complacent and comfortable with the devil they know.
If they're still using physical floppies, then their process is broken now, so virtualising it will almost certainly un-break it.
A simple "clarifier" for this kind of thought process that I like to use is: If you were already using the new option (virtualised legacy hardware), would you think it a good idea to convert it to using open drives with convenient dust ingress, non-existent support and supply chain, glacially slow mechanical moving parts, and hilariously antiquated crunching noises for all data access? Would you? Really? Or would you recoil in horror at the very idea?
I use the same kind of logic on people who think staying on Windows Server 2012 in <current year> is a good idea. Would you downgrade Windows Server 2025 to 2012? Why not? You think it's a great platform, apparently!
PS: I worked on a large scale DOS-era software virtualisation project where we moved ~20K users onto a Windows + Citrix platform. We eliminated about 6000 floppy drives and about a million(!) tapes, and the resulting system was so much faster and reliable than the original that people were trying to bribe the project manager to be put at the front of the migration queue.
Let me complain you about how error-prone and unreliable are real floppy disks. ):
Yes, but if it is just a PC running Windows 95, likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, or if worst comes to worst, keep Windows 95 and stick it in a VM. I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else.
The use case where physical floppy emulators really shine is with much more exotic legacy systems. Some years ago there was a furore that the US nuclear arsenal was still being managed using 8-inch floppy disks (used in IBM Series/1s, 16-bit minicomputers from the 1970s). USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, but I suspect they kept the Series/1 minicomputers and just replaced the 8-inch floppy drives with hardware emulators (which probably each cost an utter fortune when you add up the premiums anyone will charge for it being the military, being highly classified, and above all being related to glowing things that go boom)
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.
It’s about as effective as placing a monkey in a porcelain shop then walking away while commenting loudly “Now now, it is very important none of the porcelain breaks, everyone knows it must remain intact”. The monkey doesn’t give a shit.
Butchering a proverb: “The best time to reorganise your porcelain store was before you bought a monkey. The second best time is after you sell the monkey.”
I imagine log4j wasn't a problem either.
can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?
If anyone knows what ATC software they are using in the wild, let me know. A screenshot would suffice.