> 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.
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)
"Everyone agrees - this is non-partisan" is itself a piece of rhetoric designed to create that reality in a situation where it's in doubt. If everyone actually agreed you wouldn't need to emphasize it.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, I fully agree personally, my only concern at least would be that once the transition project gets started, if the wrong "loudest" vessels in government need to make some noise about overspending to distract from other things, maybe this project might be used as a scape goat.
I can see it already actually : "The FAA was working fine and yet they want these X billions to have shiny new silicon valley machines, paid to big tech by the tax payers"
As horrible as that sounds, I don't think many people would say that it couldn't happen.
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.”
Yea, I'd be more worried that they're going to hire a 19 year old who knows nothing about tech or aviation, but who happens to be the son of a Heritage Foundation big shot, to head up the FAA tech modernization project. The scariest part of this administration is how unnecessary knowledge and expertise is when it comes to hiring the leaders.
Operating systems have gotten a whole lot more reliable since Windows 95. The way I remember it, Windows 98 would regularly corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled. I'd done it so many times that I could pretty much recite the license key from memory. Modern Linux is rock solid. Even Windows 10 is very stable. They might be 'bloated', but modern OS's are way, way more stable.
corrupt itself and need to be manually reinstalled
In my experience that's normally the fault of third-party software, and otherwise quite easy to determine and avoid/fix. Now OSes with more protections just hide those bugs, causing most software to regress to a barely-working state.
I ran 98SE as a daily driver from late 1999 until 2010, and it was reinstalled at most 3 times, not even coinciding with hardware upgrades.
Operating systems were always more reliable than Windows95 from the day it was introduced. Protected memory and process privilege were not exactly unknown when DEC was selling VMS. Or for that matter when Microsoft was selling Windows NT. That the FAA cheaped out then, choosing an inferior system with no technical merit, is prelude to the current problem.
I've noticed that operating systems can get very flaky when the disk space gets tight. It seems that too much code does not check for disk full write failures.
It was still very much like modern systems. If you didn't install, uninstall, or aggressively reconfigure things they were pretty stable, and controlled changes could be achieved. Some of the problem though was that the systems required a lot of that to do anything fun with them at home.
As the article points out: the hardware is at risk of physically failing and it’s getting harder to replace like for like. That’s the reason for looking at an upgrade. Hell, even turning the machines off to replace them is a challenge since some systems need to run 24/7!
Yes, we know that floppy disks and drives will wear out, and they have few if any sources for new repair parts. So the fact that the system is still more or less working today doesn't mean it isn't doomed and needs to be replaced before experiencing a catastrophic unrecoverable failure.
I read some years ago - IIRC the letters pages of BYTE, which dates it - about a critical factory control system in a company somewhere running on an IBM XT. The MFM drive had started to show some errors, so they got in touch with IBM, who being IBM, did not have any drives in stock (they'd stopped making them 15 years previously), but could retool a manufacturing line and make some. They offered to do it for $250k/drive. The company paid up.
That was cheaper at that time, than modernising that system. But it's clearly not long-term scalable.
I've heard of S/360s in KTLO mode in basements keeping banks running. Teams of people slowly crafting COBOL to get new features in at a cost of thousand of dollars a day each, and it "still works". But from a risk point of view, this is also ridiculous.
Safety critical systems have different economics. Yes, you can keep the floppy systems going, but the cost of keeping them going is rising exponentially each year, and at some point a failure will cost one or more airliners full of civilians and the blame will be put on not having a reasonable upgrade policy.
Sometimes you have to fix things before they stop working, or the cost is not just eyewateringly expensive in terms of dollars, but of human lives too.
IBM mainframes can run software written in the 1960s without modification. There’s no reason anyone would keep using an obsolete mainframe, and IBM usually leased them anyway and would refuse to support obsoleted machines.
Let's be a little more reasonable. I don't think anyone is saying we need AI. There are numerous other technological advances between floppy drives and AI that our air traffic control system could benefit.
Does it work? Sure. You have to ask more questions. How much does it cost to keep it working? How much would it cost to upgrade? If we do nothing, along what sort of timeline can we expect it to stop working, or become cost prohibitive to maintain?
Well also, 20 years is less time then you think. For a system of this magnitude, deploying the replacement could easily take 5 years to get all the way through to full completion. So that's 1/4 of your runway gone right there.
Every year you delay is pushing that lower, and then there's whether the funding is available because you're in fairweather economic conditions or if crisis will happen concordantly with some other crisis (I.e. do you want to be stuck replacing air traffic control systems in a rush because some war has wiped out the floppy supply chain right as your air logistics is a critical issue?)
The article completed skipped over this. This video was released literally a week ago and is completely mocking the FAA. Floppy disks are a big joke in this video.
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. ):
> 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)
> 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,
They only said a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution”. At least that's all I could find.[0] The article indicates that things get repaired down to the "component level", but specialist civilians.
And this bit was interesting as well:
"While SACC’s hardware is decades old, its software is constantly refreshed by young Air Force programmers who learn software development skills at Offutt’s Rapid Agile Development Lab. Most work on the software and interfaces seen by end-users like intercontinental ballistic missile launch crews, rewriting legacy code to make it more modern and sustainable, said Master Sgt. Travis Menard, 595th SCS’s programming section chief."
> I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else.
Based on my experience with older government systems, this is likely an incorrect assumption. It was extremely popular in the 90s to create custom hardware that integrated directly to windows machines. I've had to reverse engineer so many drivers to upgrade old bespoke equipment to integrate with newer OSs
Tomshardware could do better reporting. There is no such thing as a computer that can’t fail, or a component that can’t be replaced. Does our reporter think the entire system was installed 25 years ago, and not one component has been replaced since? More likely it’s the ship of Theseus, and not one component is original.
I’ve replaced whole systems without interruption. You build in compatibility, then replace every computer one by one, and phase out use of the compatibility. It’s not rocket surgery.
Technical sites could be superior to the reporting in the general media on technical issues. It doesn’t have to be be stenography.
I think they are just trying to get across how critical this infrastructure is, it can't be powered down for several days and unscheduled maintenance is risky.
The other problem they are up against is that there are not many people around that still understand how it works or what the edge cases are.
Upgrading these large distributed systems can be painful. The NHS tried to upgrade their software, over £10 bn later and they abandoned it [1].
Minor nit: There are classes of computers which contain redundant CPUs, PSUs, memory, etc where the components are hot swappable. Very specialized and expensive hardware which is statistically unlikely to ever need a reboot!
Source: My cousin used to sell these systems back in the 90's and 00's.
Aside from that, the upgrades to this critical infrastructure should be resistant to hacking and other vulnerabilities
They should realise that, unlike e.g. USB drives or SSDs or even HDDs[1], floppy disks are dumb raw media and cannot contain any "hidden" behaviour, and the failure modes are well-known.
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.
Which is what baffles me about the current situation and gives me a lot of hope for this effort. We should've been updating this stuff in the 90s, but successive administrations of both parties have just passed the ball on this one.
I see this the opposite way: kudos to the FAA for sticking it out so long on legacy hardware and software as long as they have!
ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them.
If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.
What I don’t understand in such reports is why there is no mention at all how this is done in other countries. Do they all still use floppy disks? Did they do an upgrade? How did it go? Surely this would be valuable information.
A considerable number of countries use systems based on ex-Eurocat now TopSky, for their air traffic controllers, which is a distributed system.
Install and updates are via a registry based system, and it supports Windows, Linux, macOS - because its mostly written in Ada and R, as of 2012. (Most are running on top of Linux, as far as I'm aware).
Is this one of those things like phones or banking where the early adopters are stuck with old tech due to inertia while late adopters are using newer technology?
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).
Their governments fund the upgrades instead of running around claiming their flight agencies are full of corruption and inefficiency with no basis in reality.
The upgrades have been funded for decades. It is an execution issue, not a money issue. Many other parts of the Federal government are in the same condition: software upgrades that are infinite money sinks that never produce much after decades of effort.
I've worked around some of these programs. I've had visibility into some of them for 15 years over which there has been zero forward progress despite unreasonably large amounts of money being spent. It is no secret why those programs are permanently broken but no one wants to have that conversation.
I remember reading a drone startup saying they had an easier time operating in Kenya than in the US because Kenya's ATC system was fully modernized, with every aircraft tracked at all times.
Readit News
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.
I can see it already actually : "The FAA was working fine and yet they want these X billions to have shiny new silicon valley machines, paid to big tech by the tax payers"
As horrible as that sounds, I don't think many people would say that it couldn't happen.
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.”
Not to mention rampant anti-intellectualism
I would trust a floppy-powered Windows 95 system over the horror show that passes for common operating systems in 2025.
What will they think of next? Adding AI to the ATC system?
In my experience that's normally the fault of third-party software, and otherwise quite easy to determine and avoid/fix. Now OSes with more protections just hide those bugs, causing most software to regress to a barely-working state.
I ran 98SE as a daily driver from late 1999 until 2010, and it was reinstalled at most 3 times, not even coinciding with hardware upgrades.
Deleted Comment
As the article points out: the hardware is at risk of physically failing and it’s getting harder to replace like for like. That’s the reason for looking at an upgrade. Hell, even turning the machines off to replace them is a challenge since some systems need to run 24/7!
That was cheaper at that time, than modernising that system. But it's clearly not long-term scalable.
I've heard of S/360s in KTLO mode in basements keeping banks running. Teams of people slowly crafting COBOL to get new features in at a cost of thousand of dollars a day each, and it "still works". But from a risk point of view, this is also ridiculous.
Safety critical systems have different economics. Yes, you can keep the floppy systems going, but the cost of keeping them going is rising exponentially each year, and at some point a failure will cost one or more airliners full of civilians and the blame will be put on not having a reasonable upgrade policy.
Sometimes you have to fix things before they stop working, or the cost is not just eyewateringly expensive in terms of dollars, but of human lives too.
Every year you delay is pushing that lower, and then there's whether the funding is available because you're in fairweather economic conditions or if crisis will happen concordantly with some other crisis (I.e. do you want to be stuck replacing air traffic control systems in a rush because some war has wiped out the floppy supply chain right as your air logistics is a critical issue?)
This whole thing is being done as a reaction to this video:
https://youtu.be/YeABJbvcJ_k?t=1540
The article completed skipped over this. This video was released literally a week ago and is completely mocking the FAA. Floppy disks are a big joke in this video.
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)
They only said a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution”. At least that's all I could find.[0] The article indicates that things get repaired down to the "component level", but specialist civilians.
And this bit was interesting as well:
"While SACC’s hardware is decades old, its software is constantly refreshed by young Air Force programmers who learn software development skills at Offutt’s Rapid Agile Development Lab. Most work on the software and interfaces seen by end-users like intercontinental ballistic missile launch crews, rewriting legacy code to make it more modern and sustainable, said Master Sgt. Travis Menard, 595th SCS’s programming section chief."
[0] https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2019/10/17/the-us-nuclear-force...
Based on my experience with older government systems, this is likely an incorrect assumption. It was extremely popular in the 90s to create custom hardware that integrated directly to windows machines. I've had to reverse engineer so many drivers to upgrade old bespoke equipment to integrate with newer OSs
famous last words. /s
Tomshardware could do better reporting. There is no such thing as a computer that can’t fail, or a component that can’t be replaced. Does our reporter think the entire system was installed 25 years ago, and not one component has been replaced since? More likely it’s the ship of Theseus, and not one component is original.
I’ve replaced whole systems without interruption. You build in compatibility, then replace every computer one by one, and phase out use of the compatibility. It’s not rocket surgery.
Technical sites could be superior to the reporting in the general media on technical issues. It doesn’t have to be be stenography.
The other problem they are up against is that there are not many people around that still understand how it works or what the edge cases are.
Upgrading these large distributed systems can be painful. The NHS tried to upgrade their software, over £10 bn later and they abandoned it [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-...
Source: My cousin used to sell these systems back in the 90's and 00's.
Deleted Comment
They should realise that, unlike e.g. USB drives or SSDs or even HDDs[1], floppy disks are dumb raw media and cannot contain any "hidden" behaviour, and the failure modes are well-known.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23735424
Look up floppy boot sector viruses.
Deleted Comment
ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them.
If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.
"I stopped counting long ago, but there have been many, many attempts to try to modernize the US’s air traffic control (ATC) system over the years"
https://crankyflier.com/2025/05/12/the-us-government-tries-t...
I am sure you can find better sources as there are so many of them.
https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_em...
Install and updates are via a registry based system, and it supports Windows, Linux, macOS - because its mostly written in Ada and R, as of 2012. (Most are running on top of Linux, as far as I'm aware).
No floppy disks, no underrunning DOS, etc.
https://www.navcanada.ca/en/news/news-releases/nav-canada-an...
https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-air...
I've worked around some of these programs. I've had visibility into some of them for 15 years over which there has been zero forward progress despite unreasonably large amounts of money being spent. It is no secret why those programs are permanently broken but no one wants to have that conversation.