US FAA says it will phase out floppy disks from air traffic control by 2028

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!

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.

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.

I never understood this thinking of "I don't need a source repo". As soon as I learned about RCS, I started to used it for all of my code. Why? So I can easily diff my changes and review history.

Even though it wasn't part of the curriculum, I learned to use Git (and Mercurial) before I finished school. I found it pretty useful then even for school projects that were, by their nature, solo projects that would never see the light of day. I didn't find Git super burdensome.

Idk, I feel like the difficulty of Git (which is real in some respects) has long been exaggerated by people who are categorically unwilling to RTFM.

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.

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.

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.

Which is why many systems on most airliners are redundant in threes (though under double fault may operate in a degraded mode).

> The primary was being inspected

So in reality you didn't have two systems.

otherwise you would have shut down operations until you had another connection live, so you had 2 online connections.

And yet with the 747MAX we saw that bureaucrats at the FAA were heavily influenced by Boeing.

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.

Really going to ignore what happened between FAA and Boeing with the MAX?

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!

100% agree. Well said. They also rarely/never provide any concrete evidence to support their claim.

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.

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?

> 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?

I had a customer with a slightly dusty office and we simply gave up on tape drives as a backup storage medium because we were replacing the drives or tapes on a monthly basis.

We switched them over to external USB enclosures with cheap SATA drives in them and never looked back.

Ohhh, don't compare magnetic backup tapes to floppy. Same designs underneath but completely different storage shell, delivery mechanism, even the coating is different.

One cost $100 another $1.

Then these tapes are typically write once read many.

They were designed to deal with floppy disk flaws consumers deal with.

Actually really cool to read about modern tape systems.

This is just flatly false. You're comparing a worst case SSD with maybe 10% of its writes left to an extremely lucky floppy disk that hasn't died to binder hydrolysis, mold and fungal growth, warping or demagnetization. And you also completely made up that you couldn't generate a strong enough magnetic field at home to corrupt one - you absolutely could especially since rare earth magnets are not that uncommon and are more than enough to kill a floppy.

"mog"?

That is the first I ever saw the term "mog" used outside of bodybuiy/looksmaxxing.

More info here: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mog

There's flash, and then there's flash.

Say, the Siemens PLCs I earn my living programming uses SD cards which range from 64kB to, uh, 128MB, methinks.

They still work after decades, so clearly, you can get long term reliable flash storage; just don't expect to be able to store your 4k holiday videos on them.

NOTAMs, on the other hand? Go ahead!

Survivorship bias. Floppies failed all the time. Flash can be unreliable if you’re talking about the cheapest or abused the wrong way, but flash SSDs handled wisely are much better than hdds , which in turn are much better than floppies.

If you compare the thumb stick that came free from a convention then compare it to a floppy that came free with a magazine. And in the end neither matters because they’re both cheapest possible junk, not fair examples of the tech.

Similarly, the cheapest led bulbs (put in poorly ventilated fittings) have crappy lifetimes, but that’s not the techs fault, it’s because they weren’t engineered to last, they are cheap crap. Well designed leds placed sensibly are vastly better than bulbs, but that’s hidden by the cheap end of the market

Why do you write it as “Apple forward slash forward slash E”?

Of course some will last longer. It's not a cliff, just "not recommended to use for longer than...". But a lot depends on the conditions of storage, how much usage they got, etc. Manufacturers gave them 10-20 years normally, which puts almost all of them in the not recommended territory.

The fact people have old working floppies doesn't change the fact that degradation happens.

And I went through dozens looking for one that worked. Ymmv.

50% of the time it works every time!

The more expensive blurays are quite long lasting, being non-dye based.

Absent doing something wildly abusive, vinyl records will play fine for a long time. And the degradation is comparatively graceful.

Source: go to any used record shop and find a copy of Chicago >5[0]. It'll almost certainly play, even if the music wasn't particularly good to start with.

[0] There are many copies of later Chicago albums in used record stores.

Is that what it says of the article or is this just a manifestation of an outrage hobby?

You put it so much better than I could have. It's as though software bloat is just destined to run slightly higher than Moore's Law. A Mac SE/30 with a spinning hard drive, a PowerBook G4 (also with a HDD), a 7th Gen Intel PC, an M1 Mac. All of them can open a basic app like Calendar in... 3-5 seconds. Even with nothing else running. Yet each one in that list is orders of magnitude more powerful than the previous by every measure.

That said the 3.5" drives were actually electrically compatible with the double density 8" SA-800 drives.

Can't believe how interesting watching that was, thanks. I learned about GreaseWeazle which I might use one day to backup some of my old copy protected disks.

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.

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 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.

If the power’s out you just ask a nearby plane to fly directly toward the tower for a minute and illuminate it that way.

I think anything we could roll out today would be equally superior whether audio or text mode. Both ought to be available. The important part is instead of enduring the potato audio quality and the zero managing of conflicts, we could have crystal clear audio and, with some kind of a CDMA/packet switched thing, two transmissions sent at the same time could be buffered and play sequentially, and also without too much work, the message “for you” or comms for an emergency aircraft would be prioritized.

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.

> one was under maintenance

So they didnt have a redundant connection. They had 1 live one that was severed.

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.

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.

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.

You need to be willing to take risks or nothing will get done. It's okay to accept that people will die. People die every second of every day.

> 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.

And what an absolutely awful summarization of your argument. The take of let's not change anything ever and trust the process won't work long term.

Yes it's a risk I'm willing to take. But because of redundancy it will be 0.

You can justify any waste with that argument. Saying things will cost lives is just a way to interject bureaucracy to slow down a project. You are the enemy of progress even if you don't realize it.