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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Computers have skyrocketed in price, data center related equipment is impossible to get and ludicrously expensive and AI slop has infested almost everything I see online.
AI does not know friend from foe. Iranian schoolgirls were killed by assumably an AI-directed decision. In games, there is an undo button. For those piloting killer drones having grown up in a nintendo world, one of the first things they are taught is there is no undo.
> 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.
One place I applied to 'hmm think we toss it onto sourcesafe once and awhile'. It was their main product. They had about 15 people working on it. Plus one big ol folder on that one machine that was 'the builds'.
Some slight rigor shows you are not just doing whatever. I found most projects once you scale past 2 or 3 people and your 3rd release you basically are forced into some sort source control. Or it is a game of 'what file did they break today and I have to spend 3 hours fixing before I can add my feature'. Then you end up with merge meetings and very weird things happening.
Usually missing source control in an older org means there is a large swath of tech debt. Watch for the weeds. You will find other things very quickly.
>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.
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.
> ...getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware.
Some of the signal control infrastructure for the Melbourne rail network was ported over to an emulated PDP-11 System for this reason. This was previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514553
My understanding, from a long retired uncle (after a 40 year career at the National Institues of Health writing nothing but Fortran), is that Claude writes perfectly idiomatic, performant Fortran. Which I suppose is not a surprise given how it was trained, but I still found amusing to hear.
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).
Not only drivers. The initial release of Windows 95 predates USB itself, so the entire USB stack didn't appear until later OEM service releases that AFAIK were never released as updates for existing installs or even as retail products (unless you count MSDN or OEM System Builder products with their associated license restrictions).
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.
Yes - but those examples don't all have the same risk modalities. With dams and reactors, most failure variables can be permanently contained by initial system design/engineering and construction quality, continually inspected surroundings and internals, and physics certainty. Human inputs are limited and daily inspection matters, but any momentary error or lapse of operator attention won't result in instant destruction. You have hours and days with Dams, minutes and hours with reactors. In aviation it only takes a split second.
Aviation involves constant unpredictable human inputs and physical states. Hundreds of vehicles, not installations designed to have as few moving parts as possible. It is not yet solved, the status quo merely has a societally tolerable death rate. There can be new sensor hardware, more safety redundancies, and info synthesis/notification interfaces that are currently blocked by old hardware bottlenecks. Controller and pilot time and attention is limited, and it can be wasted less.
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.
The problem is that in the FAA's domain, there are legitimately situations where bureaucracy is indispensable. For example, they just issued an AD to require inspections of a few specific bolts on early production 787s because Boeing thinks they MAY have bolted the wings on with incorrectly sized shims, which over a decade MAY contribute to accelerated fatigue on these parts. Not a single plane has crashed but this kind of thing has caused other planes to crash in the past.
These airplanes are flying all over the world, the inspections need ultrasonic data, and the FAA has to validate that all of them are done. Even identifying this issue required lots of bureaucracy.
Multiply that by the number of airplanes and airplane models and it's easy to see why they move so slowly: when you are putting millions of people in the air each day, enforcing absurdly specific rules with an iron fist requires a monster of a bureaucracy.
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.
Very interesting, I’d love to learn more. Is there anything you’d recommend in terms of a general introduction to different kinds of fault tolerance? Literature, video material, could be whatever.
Unfortunately this has been on-the-job learning for me over the last few decades so I don't have great sources to point you to, but this is covered in systems engineering courses for aerospace and automotive applications.
The 747 had 4 independent hydraulic systems (one for each engine). There were still failures that took out all 4. What comes to mind is the one where the rear pressure bulkhead failed (due to a faulty repair), and the decompression took out the rudder and all 4 hydraulics.
The pilot no longer had flight controls. He desperately tried to control the airplane using variable thrust, but it just wasn't good enough, and crashed into a mountainside.
The fix was to add automatic valves in the lines so loss of pressure wouldn't bleed out the whole system.
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.
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.
Ridiculous false dichotomy. The bureaucracy can get in the way sometimes, but ultimately it is about safety, and the FAA has done an amazing job over the past several decades regulating the skies and played a massive role in making aviation as safe as it is. Standards are rigid and very well defined and change slowly because aviation is an industry where mistakes create massive disasters. There is some collateral inefficiency from things moving slow but thats way preferable to the collateral damage that would be caused by "move fast break things".
Although you were generally right, you can't say that after the parties between Boeing and FAA agents, nor FAA using Boeing consultants to inspect Boeing, fail inspections, still pass them, crash 4 planes and be humiliated by having Boeing Max flight permissions only revoked by the European authority. And the Macdonnell history with FAA says it is not new.
The fiber cut was to the Philadelphia TRACON facility, which is run by the FAA. Also, the FAA runs the towers at airports, unless it's a contract facility. No idea how the infra is handled at contract facilities, but I'd be shocked if it didn't follow FAA guidelines, such that the FAA is dictating the levels of redundancy available.
Also, there's a big difference between a small towered airport in a more rural area, and a major international airport with 10x or more the commercial traffic. So there's probably some difference of buildout depending on the facility usage.
Quick edit: looks like there were two fiber cut incidents recently, one at an airport last month, and the TRACON issue that happened 1.5 months ago!
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Sure, but what are the odds they're using these rather than HD 3.5" disks purchased from whatever new old stock they've been able to source over the past 20-odd years?
3.5" floppies were still common while I was in college. I have distinct memories of copying a project to a floppy in my dorm room, popping the disk out, walking next door (literally next door in the dorms, not even going outside up or down stairs or anything), popping the disk into a team member's PC and the project being gone. We laughed it off and chucked the disk in the trash and got another. Project wasn't lost-lost since I had a copy on my hard disk. This was also the era of the 100MB Zip Drives, which I also had in my PC and thankfully all of our lab PCs had, too. That's what I normally used for all of my day-to-day file transfers of any real import. I still have my zip disks, but I seem to have lost my zip drive, so no idea if the disks still have any data on them.
Yeah at the time. You would get the whole range of good/bad disks. Sometimes even between computers. May work just fine on one computer and not the next. It was not common but it wasnt totally rare either. Just sometimes would catch out out at silly times.
That they are still used in a critical infra item is a bit surprising. Getting new stock would be a major hassle.
I was on a school paper in high school and was taking photos on a "digital" camera that wrote to 3.5" floppies. Some of them are still with the (printed) copies of my articles I kept. I'll have to see if they survived.
This is probably my "I'm getting old" moment. Good lord.
I used to do floppy disk data recovery as a service for students at college. Roughly speaking, we helped one student out every three hours, out of 2,500 students, during busy hours. Based on the rates and hours, I think it would come out to something like 25% of the student body, each year, coming to us with a data loss incident involving floppy disks.
YMMV. I’m sure a lot of people were shoving these things into backpacks, and this was post-2000, so the quality of disks for sale was poorer than it was in the 90s and 80s.
I’ve also (since then, for myself) repaired drives. The drives fail because they’re mechanical and have motors, and anything that moves or has a motor in it will need some kind of service. Servicing a floppy drive requires specialized equipment which is hard to find (or requires a lot of patience—it’s possible to repair a floppy drive with just a screwdriver, but it’s not fun; guess how I know?)
And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive and it’s not because usb drives are reliable.
Without having details on the specific floppy disks in question there’s no way you can authoritatively say they are unreliable. They absolutely produced floppy disks that were far more reliable than the ones sourced from the cheapest vendor possible some of us used in school back in the day. Ignoring the fact I’m guessing the disks in question aren’t having to survive life in a students backpack.
Within this is a further heartening reassurance that I chose a profession I will be able to do until my dying day. But at 55 I see my safest option is my own business where some higher up doesn't take me off a role I improve to give it to someone they know.
> 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.
Can you recall anything that that engineer said or did which turned out to be credible? Or which you perhaps learned from?
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?
> but the rest of us have supercomputers in our pockets.
The issue is they don't feel like supercomputers, because of how much they've been taken for granted.
My computer and phone today feel no faster or better to use than they did 20 years ago. They might be vastly more capable for niche applications, but for the day-to-day stuff it seems like we keep buying new hardware, so we can run the latest software at the same old speeds, mostly for security updates.
I have an M1 MBP... a bit old, but still does everything I need. When I click Calendar in the dock (when it is already open, but just haven't used it in a while), it can take 3-5 seconds to come to the front as the active app. It feels broken. This wait wasn't a thing 5 years ago on this hardware, nor was it an issue on a PPC Mac from 25 years ago. Yet now its' a problem... why? So the UI can calculate the refraction of the background image in the liquid glass? Should I be spending $2,500 on a new MBP just to switch more quickly from my browser to the Calendar? It doesn't make much sense.
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.
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.
Yeah, AI has become the only source of information that once could be gotten with Google. For example, this FAA document: https://www.faa.gov/media/70881 which I found through chat gpt. When this well is poisoned too, not sure where things are going.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 ...
The problem is, with what media would you replace them with if you had to replace them somewhere between then and now? iomega zip drives? Jaz drives? CF cards? sony memory sticks? rewritable cds/dvds? Imation superdisks?
They could've replaced floppies multiple times, with all the certifications and hardware replacements and new procedures and regulations, and we'd still be using (a different, but still) "obsolete" medium for this now.
When I was 10 years old, way back in 1980, I got my first 5.25" diskette from the salesman of a COMPUTER AGE shop. He got tired of watching me type in the same old BASIC listings after school and spared me the damage of it by giving me the diskette, on the provision that I let other customers use the demo APPLE II's.
Sitting here now in 2026 I have a box containing almost 3000 3.5" FHD floppy disks.
Each about 1.544 Megabytes, unless you cut the notch.
I literally dumpster dived this resource after being invited in to do so at a local electronics shop closure, some years ago now, on the proviso that I did not leave empty handed.
There are about 12 devices in my living room that can use these things, but I'll never use more than 30.
Some day, I'll see the last one go. That'll be weird.
I was in a tower last year. They were sequencing aircraft with little loops of paper placed onto a wooden dowel. It can and should be better. Doesn't need to be whiz-bang, but it should not be paper slips and wooden sticks. (and floppy disks)
Paper flight progress strips [1] have famously resisted replacement, even though they keep trying [2].
Every 5 years or so, a different publication will write an in-depth story about how difficult they are to replace, because nothing works nearly as well, and the controllers go back to using paper every time a new system is trialed. I think I've even read about them in a cognitive psychology textbook at uni.
This is nearly the exact reason most 'smart home' systems fail eventually. They become very brittle after the hardware gets 'old'. Where as the dumb tech from the 1950s still 'just works' and costs 1/20th of the smart switch.
In that system you can tell what is going on by looking at in a glance and works with no power. Sometimes simple is a great answer.
However, I can think of one reason the 'no power' argument fails. They do a lot by radio. That needs power. Also you would need to retrain everyone. Oh and you probably would get locked into one company that wants to control the whole software stack and sell tons of support.
I have a friend who is a real estate agent for the wealthy. He laughs at the people who automate their homes. The automation inevitably fails, the vendor has disappeared, and the owner is faced with ripping all the wiring out of the walls and replacing it. Usually it gets replaced with conventional wiring.
When my home was built in 1999, I poured over all the home automation systems. I opted for conventional wiring. But I did wire every room (myself) with cat5 cable and RG6 coax, in a star configuration. It has served me very well, no problems at all.
I don't use the RG6 anymore, as my TV service comes over the intertoobs now. The cat5 isn't supposed to work with gigabit equipment, but it works fine. Wifi has improved by leaps and bounds, but I still rely on hardwired ethernet, as it is stupid reliable.
Those things actually work great, not everything has to be modernized for modernization sake... that's how we get cars with touchscreens instead of buttons and knobs.
Better in what way? They have avoided replacement specifically because they work extremely well and none of the alternatives have been demonstrably better.
a mechanical (wood, paper , etc) state machine is very resilient and easy to read even from across the room. No electricity demands, no lighting needed. Contains it's own mutual-exclusion (only one person can modify it at any time).
the digital version would require 10+ endpoints with 1000x points of failure.
>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.
If you are curious: one of the most frequent problems that disables fire sprinklers is maintenance forgetting to turn the water back on. No one notices until it is too late.
No one notices the thousands of times the redundant links works just fine. We only notice when the primary has an outage and a construction crew cuts a fiber line at the same time.
> 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'm more interested with the data integrity protections before the data got onto the floppy, and why those protocols (e.g. signature verification) couldn't be completed via email at the endpoint.
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
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 think what readthenotes1 is trying to say is what I was hinting at in my comment: this administration cannot be trusted to do this properly or in the service of actually making the ATC system better. They're instead doing it because the 1% says that modern == better (which for a safety-critical system is usually not actually true). The proper thing this administration should be doing is to do this as a failover at first but keep the existing ATC system running until the new system is just as safe and as capable as the original, but I get the feeling they won't do that.
> 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.
Far from it. I know for a fact the civil service (normally) doesn't change per administration. But the key word is "normally". Pretty much nothing this administration has done is normal. Do you really expect most of the people involved in this transition to know what they're doing, given that many of them are yes-men?
You're going to run that on a computer from the late 1980s or early 1990s? And how do you get the data onto those computers when they're not connected to a network, or the same network, as your other systems?
> “We’re moving away from outdated, manual processes and replacing technology that once relied on floppy disks with a modern system that allows controllers to instantly share critical flight alerts, restricted airspace schedules and pilot reports,"
So they make their systems run on the internet now?
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.
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.
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.
There was a time when the company I was working for was selling service contracts for DEC TZ30 tape drives to DEC itself because their own internal service organization was unwilling or unable to support them.
The application was software distribution, most likely to customers they were contractually obligated to support, and no newer drives were able to write the required tape format, so upgrading to newer drives wasn't an option.
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.
The overall reliability of a system is time invariant... its either reliable, or not.
The fact that it has gone x days without an incident doesnt upgrade or downgrade its reliability. The engineering and processes are function in an equation that calculates mean time to failure. Life-critical processes have numbers placed to this... like a failure every 50 years or 100 years... or 100000 years, and you work towards solving that.
Systems are dynamic, not static. There are secondary consequences and forgotten/ignored opportunity costs. Sure, the existing system has proven workarounds, though labor and attention intensive. When a floppy disk fails it won't directly create disaster. But these legacy requirements do block the more cohesive and thorough introduction of additional safety mechanisms that increase redundancy and reduce the scope of possible human error - such as new sensor hardware and their automation, latency improvements, and information synthesis/notification clarity.
Here's a software analogy - required support for very old OS versions often interferes with the scope, simplicity, and security of new feature work, and even if the work is still feasible at that point it is slowed down greatly, eating up attention and time that could go towards addressing other important issues. That accumulates over time, and cumulative loss of improvements that could have otherwise been made has a real effect in unprevented disasters and wasted controller availability.
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.
I have heard of exploits that can root a machine from inserting a USB device (in fact, this has been used by attackers to conspicuously leave thumb drives in the parking lots of organizations they want to attack).
I have never heard of a sploit that roots your machine from inserting a floppy.
> 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 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.
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.
> 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?
I liked the process but i didnt see a counter pressure to the SRM process. It often became a hard blocker.
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.
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!
Maybe this was an HQ problem over a lower level problem.
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.
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.
Aren't you making the exact same mistake with AI? What has been the worst problem caused by AI so far?
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.
Computers have skyrocketed in price, data center related equipment is impossible to get and ludicrously expensive and AI slop has infested almost everything I see online.
And then there are the safety issues.
AI does not know friend from foe. Iranian schoolgirls were killed by assumably an AI-directed decision. In games, there is an undo button. For those piloting killer drones having grown up in a nintendo world, one of the first things they are taught is there is no undo.
> 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.
One place I applied to 'hmm think we toss it onto sourcesafe once and awhile'. It was their main product. They had about 15 people working on it. Plus one big ol folder on that one machine that was 'the builds'.
Some slight rigor shows you are not just doing whatever. I found most projects once you scale past 2 or 3 people and your 3rd release you basically are forced into some sort source control. Or it is a game of 'what file did they break today and I have to spend 3 hours fixing before I can add my feature'. Then you end up with merge meetings and very weird things happening.
Usually missing source control in an older org means there is a large swath of tech debt. Watch for the weeds. You will find other things very quickly.
>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.
The assumption that moving slower and more bureaucratically increases safety and reliability is one of the most harmful myths out there.
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.
It was bad enough in 1986 when F-16 pilots had to bring their own cassette players on missions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVHEFiLQ3GU
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.
Fortran is still used in scientific computing.
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.
> ...getting the current software running in a VM specifically to make it easier to transition to new hardware.
Some of the signal control infrastructure for the Melbourne rail network was ported over to an emulated PDP-11 System for this reason. This was previously discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42514553
Fortran is still the choice for Nuclear Engineering too.
My understanding, from a long retired uncle (after a 40 year career at the National Institues of Health writing nothing but Fortran), is that Claude writes perfectly idiomatic, performant Fortran. Which I suppose is not a surprise given how it was trained, but I still found amusing to hear.
Linux 7.4 got fixes for floppy disk handling, as recently as yesterday!
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
A bit odd that they didn't at least update to using USB thumb drives. Those are readily available and at least as reliable as magnetic floppy disks.
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).
Not only drivers. The initial release of Windows 95 predates USB itself, so the entire USB stack didn't appear until later OEM service releases that AFAIK were never released as updates for existing installs or even as retail products (unless you count MSDN or OEM System Builder products with their associated license restrictions).
You can get floppy disks and USB-C floppy drives on Amazon. Drives are under $20.
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.
Yes - but those examples don't all have the same risk modalities. With dams and reactors, most failure variables can be permanently contained by initial system design/engineering and construction quality, continually inspected surroundings and internals, and physics certainty. Human inputs are limited and daily inspection matters, but any momentary error or lapse of operator attention won't result in instant destruction. You have hours and days with Dams, minutes and hours with reactors. In aviation it only takes a split second.
Aviation involves constant unpredictable human inputs and physical states. Hundreds of vehicles, not installations designed to have as few moving parts as possible. It is not yet solved, the status quo merely has a societally tolerable death rate. There can be new sensor hardware, more safety redundancies, and info synthesis/notification interfaces that are currently blocked by old hardware bottlenecks. Controller and pilot time and attention is limited, and it can be wasted less.
Creating a rigorous process to ensure safety will create somewhat of a bureaucracy.
But creating a bureaucracy doesn't mean you've created a rigorous process to ensure safety.
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.
I feel a bit weird that I'm fairly certain that I read this discussion a while ago, in another post...
The problem is that in the FAA's domain, there are legitimately situations where bureaucracy is indispensable. For example, they just issued an AD to require inspections of a few specific bolts on early production 787s because Boeing thinks they MAY have bolted the wings on with incorrectly sized shims, which over a decade MAY contribute to accelerated fatigue on these parts. Not a single plane has crashed but this kind of thing has caused other planes to crash in the past.
These airplanes are flying all over the world, the inspections need ultrasonic data, and the FAA has to validate that all of them are done. Even identifying this issue required lots of bureaucracy.
Multiply that by the number of airplanes and airplane models and it's easy to see why they move so slowly: when you are putting millions of people in the air each day, enforcing absurdly specific rules with an iron fist requires a monster of a bureaucracy.
The primary was being inspected and the secondary failed.
There were two independent systems.
Which is why many systems on most airliners are redundant in threes (though under double fault may operate in a degraded mode).
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.
Very interesting, I’d love to learn more. Is there anything you’d recommend in terms of a general introduction to different kinds of fault tolerance? Literature, video material, could be whatever.
Unfortunately this has been on-the-job learning for me over the last few decades so I don't have great sources to point you to, but this is covered in systems engineering courses for aerospace and automotive applications.
“Two is one and one is none” as the saying goes.
The 747 had 4 independent hydraulic systems (one for each engine). There were still failures that took out all 4. What comes to mind is the one where the rear pressure bulkhead failed (due to a faulty repair), and the decompression took out the rudder and all 4 hydraulics.
The pilot no longer had flight controls. He desperately tried to control the airplane using variable thrust, but it just wasn't good enough, and crashed into a mountainside.
The fix was to add automatic valves in the lines so loss of pressure wouldn't bleed out the whole system.
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.
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.
And "bureaucracy" really means "grift".
An more important question is what do they plan to replace it with?
Ridiculous false dichotomy. The bureaucracy can get in the way sometimes, but ultimately it is about safety, and the FAA has done an amazing job over the past several decades regulating the skies and played a massive role in making aviation as safe as it is. Standards are rigid and very well defined and change slowly because aviation is an industry where mistakes create massive disasters. There is some collateral inefficiency from things moving slow but thats way preferable to the collateral damage that would be caused by "move fast break things".
Although you were generally right, you can't say that after the parties between Boeing and FAA agents, nor FAA using Boeing consultants to inspect Boeing, fail inspections, still pass them, crash 4 planes and be humiliated by having Boeing Max flight permissions only revoked by the European authority. And the Macdonnell history with FAA says it is not new.
The FAA doesn't run airports.
The fiber cut was to the Philadelphia TRACON facility, which is run by the FAA. Also, the FAA runs the towers at airports, unless it's a contract facility. No idea how the infra is handled at contract facilities, but I'd be shocked if it didn't follow FAA guidelines, such that the FAA is dictating the levels of redundancy available.
Also, there's a big difference between a small towered airport in a more rural area, and a major international airport with 10x or more the commercial traffic. So there's probably some difference of buildout depending on the facility usage.
Quick edit: looks like there were two fiber cut incidents recently, one at an airport last month, and the TRACON issue that happened 1.5 months ago!
> 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.
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.
> old tech in and of itself isn't bad
It is when you can't replace it, and drives do break.
is there any reasonable reason to still have the cryptic metar information sent to planes?
Do they still have those 68030 Apollo's ?
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?
Our project was SRM evaluation for digitizing NOTAMs but there may have been other parallel processes I was unaware of.
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.
my 1980s 5.25" disks still work. i'm surprised but they have laster a long time.
Sure, but what are the odds they're using these rather than HD 3.5" disks purchased from whatever new old stock they've been able to source over the past 20-odd years?
3.5" floppies were still common while I was in college. I have distinct memories of copying a project to a floppy in my dorm room, popping the disk out, walking next door (literally next door in the dorms, not even going outside up or down stairs or anything), popping the disk into a team member's PC and the project being gone. We laughed it off and chucked the disk in the trash and got another. Project wasn't lost-lost since I had a copy on my hard disk. This was also the era of the 100MB Zip Drives, which I also had in my PC and thankfully all of our lab PCs had, too. That's what I normally used for all of my day-to-day file transfers of any real import. I still have my zip disks, but I seem to have lost my zip drive, so no idea if the disks still have any data on them.
We used to copy files three times, better onto three separate floppies
Yeah at the time. You would get the whole range of good/bad disks. Sometimes even between computers. May work just fine on one computer and not the next. It was not common but it wasnt totally rare either. Just sometimes would catch out out at silly times.
That they are still used in a critical infra item is a bit surprising. Getting new stock would be a major hassle.
I was on a school paper in high school and was taking photos on a "digital" camera that wrote to 3.5" floppies. Some of them are still with the (printed) copies of my articles I kept. I'll have to see if they survived.
This is probably my "I'm getting old" moment. Good lord.
I used to do floppy disk data recovery as a service for students at college. Roughly speaking, we helped one student out every three hours, out of 2,500 students, during busy hours. Based on the rates and hours, I think it would come out to something like 25% of the student body, each year, coming to us with a data loss incident involving floppy disks.
YMMV. I’m sure a lot of people were shoving these things into backpacks, and this was post-2000, so the quality of disks for sale was poorer than it was in the 90s and 80s.
I’ve also (since then, for myself) repaired drives. The drives fail because they’re mechanical and have motors, and anything that moves or has a motor in it will need some kind of service. Servicing a floppy drive requires specialized equipment which is hard to find (or requires a lot of patience—it’s possible to repair a floppy drive with just a screwdriver, but it’s not fun; guess how I know?)
and how many bits have rotted on those?
I'd learned long ago to treat floppies like Mission Impossible tape reels, and just assume the data would self-destruct in about 5 seconds.
And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive and it’s not because usb drives are reliable.
Without having details on the specific floppy disks in question there’s no way you can authoritatively say they are unreliable. They absolutely produced floppy disks that were far more reliable than the ones sourced from the cheapest vendor possible some of us used in school back in the day. Ignoring the fact I’m guessing the disks in question aren’t having to survive life in a students backpack.
> And yet, there’s a reason we use magnetic tape for long term archive
Is it because "long-term archival" strategies aren't updated frequently?
Within this is a further heartening reassurance that I chose a profession I will be able to do until my dying day. But at 55 I see my safest option is my own business where some higher up doesn't take me off a role I improve to give it to someone they know.
> 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.
Can you recall anything that that engineer said or did which turned out to be credible? Or which you perhaps learned from?
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.
> devs take note
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?
> but the rest of us have supercomputers in our pockets.
The issue is they don't feel like supercomputers, because of how much they've been taken for granted.
My computer and phone today feel no faster or better to use than they did 20 years ago. They might be vastly more capable for niche applications, but for the day-to-day stuff it seems like we keep buying new hardware, so we can run the latest software at the same old speeds, mostly for security updates.
I have an M1 MBP... a bit old, but still does everything I need. When I click Calendar in the dock (when it is already open, but just haven't used it in a while), it can take 3-5 seconds to come to the front as the active app. It feels broken. This wait wasn't a thing 5 years ago on this hardware, nor was it an issue on a PPC Mac from 25 years ago. Yet now its' a problem... why? So the UI can calculate the refraction of the background image in the liquid glass? Should I be spending $2,500 on a new MBP just to switch more quickly from my browser to the Calendar? It doesn't make much sense.
According to this article, it's far worse than that: eight inch floppy disks! Capacity might be as much as 1.2MB per disk, but probably less. https://simpleflying.com/americas-atc-floppy-disks-12-billio...
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.
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.
Yeah, AI has become the only source of information that once could be gotten with Google. For example, this FAA document: https://www.faa.gov/media/70881 which I found through chat gpt. When this well is poisoned too, not sure where things are going.
FAA website on EIDS: https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/eids
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...
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.
There was a lot of ducks to align back then.
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.
Tiger Direct, wow that's a blast from the past!
I tried at least 5 different times to buy from them out of computer shopper. Never actually managed it. For me, every time, 'out of stock'.
> replacing outdated floppy disks that contain vital weather and other critical information with a streamlined, 21st-century system
What does this even… mean?
https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2026-04/M...
https://sysatl.com/ids4/
Twin towers spotted
An DOT Inspector General progress report from 2024:
https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/library-items/FA...
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?
Probably something something fiber optic
zip disks.
That ungoldly click of death...
¡much confidence. fly yes!
Going to 5” floppies, must have more space /s
At the very least, physical media is airgapped. Floppies still aren't a good choice though, since they develop bad sectors so easily.
> they develop bad sectors so easily
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.
I've had some bad sectors on a high-desnity 5.25 floppy go away after blowing dust off.
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 was told some 30 years ago that floppy disks only last for a couple of years
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 recently tried to copy over an old box of floppies from the 80s and 90s. I'd say 80-90% success rate.
Floppies aren't a bad technology, but they do have limits.
I doubt that SD cards will last that long.
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 ...
The problem is, with what media would you replace them with if you had to replace them somewhere between then and now? iomega zip drives? Jaz drives? CF cards? sony memory sticks? rewritable cds/dvds? Imation superdisks?
They could've replaced floppies multiple times, with all the certifications and hardware replacements and new procedures and regulations, and we'd still be using (a different, but still) "obsolete" medium for this now.
there's no such thing as air gapping when people are involved.
The weather records have to be written to the floppy from an online device at some point in the pipeline.
The workflow has likely been compromised at some time, but due to lack of data integrity checks, it was never detected.
When I was 10 years old, way back in 1980, I got my first 5.25" diskette from the salesman of a COMPUTER AGE shop. He got tired of watching me type in the same old BASIC listings after school and spared me the damage of it by giving me the diskette, on the provision that I let other customers use the demo APPLE II's.
Sitting here now in 2026 I have a box containing almost 3000 3.5" FHD floppy disks.
Each about 1.544 Megabytes, unless you cut the notch.
I literally dumpster dived this resource after being invited in to do so at a local electronics shop closure, some years ago now, on the proviso that I did not leave empty handed.
There are about 12 devices in my living room that can use these things, but I'll never use more than 30.
Some day, I'll see the last one go. That'll be weird.
> Some day, I'll see the last one go.
Equally likely: they'll see YOU go. Pape... uhm I mean floppies are patient.
Typing in the code from a listing is one way I inadvertently learned to program.
I was in a tower last year. They were sequencing aircraft with little loops of paper placed onto a wooden dowel. It can and should be better. Doesn't need to be whiz-bang, but it should not be paper slips and wooden sticks. (and floppy disks)
Paper flight progress strips [1] have famously resisted replacement, even though they keep trying [2].
Every 5 years or so, a different publication will write an in-depth story about how difficult they are to replace, because nothing works nearly as well, and the controllers go back to using paper every time a new system is trialed. I think I've even read about them in a cognitive psychology textbook at uni.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_progress_strip
[2] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/technology/tfdm/efs
Does it still work when the power goes out? Is it easy to troubleshoot? Not everything needs to be overly-complicated.
They have backup power at the airport, and no, jetliners are not arriving and departing in the event of a power outage in the tower.
This is nearly the exact reason most 'smart home' systems fail eventually. They become very brittle after the hardware gets 'old'. Where as the dumb tech from the 1950s still 'just works' and costs 1/20th of the smart switch.
In that system you can tell what is going on by looking at in a glance and works with no power. Sometimes simple is a great answer.
However, I can think of one reason the 'no power' argument fails. They do a lot by radio. That needs power. Also you would need to retrain everyone. Oh and you probably would get locked into one company that wants to control the whole software stack and sell tons of support.
I have a friend who is a real estate agent for the wealthy. He laughs at the people who automate their homes. The automation inevitably fails, the vendor has disappeared, and the owner is faced with ripping all the wiring out of the walls and replacing it. Usually it gets replaced with conventional wiring.
When my home was built in 1999, I poured over all the home automation systems. I opted for conventional wiring. But I did wire every room (myself) with cat5 cable and RG6 coax, in a star configuration. It has served me very well, no problems at all.
I don't use the RG6 anymore, as my TV service comes over the intertoobs now. The cat5 isn't supposed to work with gigabit equipment, but it works fine. Wifi has improved by leaps and bounds, but I still rely on hardwired ethernet, as it is stupid reliable.
Those things actually work great, not everything has to be modernized for modernization sake... that's how we get cars with touchscreens instead of buttons and knobs.
Better in what way? They have avoided replacement specifically because they work extremely well and none of the alternatives have been demonstrably better.
a mechanical (wood, paper , etc) state machine is very resilient and easy to read even from across the room. No electricity demands, no lighting needed. Contains it's own mutual-exclusion (only one person can modify it at any time).
the digital version would require 10+ endpoints with 1000x points of failure.
> The country's air traffic facilities cannot talk to one another and operate on individual analog computers.
I assume they just mean _old_ computers here. Unless they have some specialized analog air traffic computers? That would be pretty cool.
>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.
> Do they seriously not have a backup connection?
That was the backup connection. The primary failed, and concurrently the backup had been severed by a construction crew.
If you don't regularly test your backup, you don't have a backup.
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.
If you are curious: one of the most frequent problems that disables fire sprinklers is maintenance forgetting to turn the water back on. No one notices until it is too late.
No one notices the thousands of times the redundant links works just fine. We only notice when the primary has an outage and a construction crew cuts a fiber line at the same time.
The primary was being inspected and the secondary failed, there were redundant systems.
> 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.
I don't get why an airport can't do similar.
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.
> one was under maintenance
So they didnt have a redundant connection. They had 1 live one that was severed.
they did... it was just singly redundant. they would need double redundancy here. so 3 connections, not 2
Taking one connection out for maintenance and leaving only 1 live connection is not redundancy, it is a failed backup.
Redundancy is always having more than one live connection.
I’m surprised that they still find floppies to use considering the youngest floppy is now going to high school
I'm more interested with the data integrity protections before the data got onto the floppy, and why those protocols (e.g. signature verification) couldn't be completed via email at the endpoint.
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
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 think what readthenotes1 is trying to say is what I was hinting at in my comment: this administration cannot be trusted to do this properly or in the service of actually making the ATC system better. They're instead doing it because the 1% says that modern == better (which for a safety-critical system is usually not actually true). The proper thing this administration should be doing is to do this as a failover at first but keep the existing ATC system running until the new system is just as safe and as capable as the original, but I get the feeling they won't do that.
I would rather things be done "incompetently" than nothing being done at all.
Nothing being done at all means the system continues working as it is. Something being done incompetently means more people die.
> I would rather things be done "incompetently" than nothing being done at all.
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.
> 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.
what an absolutely awful take.
Why? Do you want more people to die? The only way to migrate a system like this safely is to do it competently and slowly.
I don't. Incompetence costs lives. Using old tech that has worked for decades costs a couple dollars extra to maintain for a system worth millions.
I find the frequent comments like this honestly bizarre, they act like the entire civil service turns over every 4 years.
Far from it. I know for a fact the civil service (normally) doesn't change per administration. But the key word is "normally". Pretty much nothing this administration has done is normal. Do you really expect most of the people involved in this transition to know what they're doing, given that many of them are yes-men?
I'm not sure I've ever laughed at a headline from a Hacker News post before.
wow never thought i would outlast them
I'd like to have some old computer accessories in home office.
The problem is the beige plastic cases have all turned into the color of bile.
Is it the last of the truly air-gapped federal agencies?
No. DOD still has a lot of air-gapped systems, some for legitimate reasons, and many out of momentum or lack of understanding of how networks work.
Replacing the drives with FlashFloppy would not be a crazy idea as a first step.
You're going to run that on a computer from the late 1980s or early 1990s? And how do you get the data onto those computers when they're not connected to a network, or the same network, as your other systems?
If it aint broke don't fix it
> “We’re moving away from outdated, manual processes and replacing technology that once relied on floppy disks with a modern system that allows controllers to instantly share critical flight alerts, restricted airspace schedules and pilot reports,"
So they make their systems run on the internet now?
What could possibly go wrong?
The folks over at The Onion are kicking themselves right now because they didn't think of this headline first.
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.
Using outdated computer systems with aging storage media is a safety issue.
Replacing them with cloud-based systems (if this is the "streamlined, 21st-century system") is a safety issue as well. I hope they are not.
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.
Yeah but none of those in-between options gets the c-suite massive bonuses because the margins aren't as large so they rarely ever do it.
Just turn WinRAR error correction up to max /s
No, it isn't. This is time tested process. Find me any flight that had to land or crashed because the floppy disk was broken.
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.
Old habits die hard.
There was a time when the company I was working for was selling service contracts for DEC TZ30 tape drives to DEC itself because their own internal service organization was unwilling or unable to support them.
The application was software distribution, most likely to customers they were contractually obligated to support, and no newer drives were able to write the required tape format, so upgrading to newer drives wasn't an option.
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.
Floppy disks aren't manufactured anymore. At some point there aren't going to be any.
The overall reliability of a system is time invariant... its either reliable, or not.
The fact that it has gone x days without an incident doesnt upgrade or downgrade its reliability. The engineering and processes are function in an equation that calculates mean time to failure. Life-critical processes have numbers placed to this... like a failure every 50 years or 100 years... or 100000 years, and you work towards solving that.
Systems are dynamic, not static. There are secondary consequences and forgotten/ignored opportunity costs. Sure, the existing system has proven workarounds, though labor and attention intensive. When a floppy disk fails it won't directly create disaster. But these legacy requirements do block the more cohesive and thorough introduction of additional safety mechanisms that increase redundancy and reduce the scope of possible human error - such as new sensor hardware and their automation, latency improvements, and information synthesis/notification clarity.
Here's a software analogy - required support for very old OS versions often interferes with the scope, simplicity, and security of new feature work, and even if the work is still feasible at that point it is slowed down greatly, eating up attention and time that could go towards addressing other important issues. That accumulates over time, and cumulative loss of improvements that could have otherwise been made has a real effect in unprevented disasters and wasted controller availability.
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.
I love the idea that the headline suggest that Sean Duffy and his family at the completion of their multi-month road trip going on another one.
This one, where the tour stops are ATC data buildings, where they only stop in to swap out floppy disks for USB drives.
This is a headline from 1996?
I have heard of exploits that can root a machine from inserting a USB device (in fact, this has been used by attackers to conspicuously leave thumb drives in the parking lots of organizations they want to attack).
I have never heard of a sploit that roots your machine from inserting a floppy.
Next they will be migrating off Internet Explorer 6
> 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.
They'll just switch to gold floppies
> You can track the progress of the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS) by state and airport on our Modern Skies website.
Another trump tell… Lame acronym.
Initialism. If this were the neocon era it'd be an awkward shoehorned acronym like SKYHAWK or something though.
hopefully not with pendrives
Zip Disks are the future. click click
I just hope they are not replacing the system with Claude
... and make it safe
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
You could call it histrionic.
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.
It’s historic because no else has done it in the last 40+ years. Doesn’t make it a big deal, but it’s still a big change.
It is a big deal if you fly :)
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.
What is this, a joke‽
alt link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/us-faa-says-phase-flo...
Out with FDD, in with GPT! (!)