I imagine log4j wasn't a problem either.
can winehq save the day in the interim or in the transition?
If anyone knows what ATC software they are using in the wild, let me know. A screenshot would suffice.
Also you need to handle planes without computers - you can land a personal plane at almost any airport. (With lots of caveats but still) Also you need to handle planes with failing automation. Also you really want to know the situation on the runways, so there's really no need to remove the single source of truth here.
An interesting point here is maybe that there's a whole world outside the US where planes fly and communicate. For example the EU has its own issues on this front but is modernizing what it does. Airspaces here are pretty dense and busy. It's not necessary to reinvent a lot of wheels here. The US could just look across its borders and learn from what is being done there.
As soon as there's a reasonable budget for this, there are all sorts of perfectly reasonable things that can be done. The core issue isn't technical.
disc - optical
disk - not optical
Eg.: floppy disks and DVD discs
Considering the current political climate and rampant government cuts to important services, I very much doubt “everyone agrees” and that this is the best time to be planning such an important transition.
It’s about as effective as placing a monkey in a porcelain shop then walking away while commenting loudly “Now now, it is very important none of the porcelain breaks, everyone knows it must remain intact”. The monkey doesn’t give a shit.
Butchering a proverb: “The best time to reorganise your porcelain store was before you bought a monkey. The second best time is after you sell the monkey.”
Floppy can be copied to hard disks and will not have to worry about failures of mechanical parts involved in reading floppy drives.
Developing a brand new system would take quit a lot of time. As all systems du if they need extreme uptime. Starting that effort now is ok but I would guess it would be take at leas a couple of years. Significant work would have to understand in detail what the current system does and does not do, and then map out what a system should do.
This is to get rid of the media only. You'll still be using the original compute hardware. But it would be an interesting step.
I feel that most of the desire to upgrade is cultural and not technical. People love to talk about the floppies being used while its just a small part of the equation. Cost and risk of creating a new system with the same reliability expectations is hard when the incumbent has decades of iteration. For systems that do not require more performance or energy efficiency the accounting on upgrading looks very different.
Virtualization just adds another layer of complexity to an already fragile system which literally thousands of human lives depend on every day. Adding more complexity is not a neutral act here, but neglectful manslaughter waiting to happen. Aviation is a low-tech, never-touch-a-running-system, risk-averse environment for a reason.
Floppies were useful because you could easily take them and take them to another, secondary, sometimes air gapped backup system. Replacing this functionality means replicating not just the data transfer, but also the safety architecture - which includes physical isolation and manual fallback paths. To recreate, the best chance would probably be something like storing the relevant info on thumb drives - but then you have whole new family of attack vectors by hostile forces (anyone still remember Stuxnet), which floppies did not have in that form?
And then there's the pesky aspect of international interoperability. One country alone cannot just storm forward. We are looking at decades of upgrades and alignments here. And that process already is underway. But proposing a radical change without acknowledging the full scope of what that entails - from certification cycles to human factors to geopolitical coordination - is not progress, it’s hubris.
"It's not broken" is the cry of the bad manager that hasn't done the proper analysis, hasn't actually looked at the pros and cons, but has simply become complacent and comfortable with the devil they know.
If they're still using physical floppies, then their process is broken now, so virtualising it will almost certainly un-break it.
A simple "clarifier" for this kind of thought process that I like to use is: If you were already using the new option (virtualised legacy hardware), would you think it a good idea to convert it to using open drives with convenient dust ingress, non-existent support and supply chain, glacially slow mechanical moving parts, and hilariously antiquated crunching noises for all data access? Would you? Really? Or would you recoil in horror at the very idea?
I use the same kind of logic on people who think staying on Windows Server 2012 in <current year> is a good idea. Would you downgrade Windows Server 2025 to 2012? Why not? You think it's a great platform, apparently!
PS: I worked on a large scale DOS-era software virtualisation project where we moved ~20K users onto a Windows + Citrix platform. We eliminated about 6000 floppy drives and about a million(!) tapes, and the resulting system was so much faster and reliable than the original that people were trying to bribe the project manager to be put at the front of the migration queue.
That's why mission-critical systems have several sets of floppy disks, and disk-multiplication stations.
> Would you? Really? Or would you recoil in horror at the very idea?
Depends. If the old system is certified and has all error modes defined, while the other new system is a black box with exciting new ways to screw up, I'd go old system ten out of ten times. Which incidentally is why NASA uses ancient chips when they build new robotic drones.
> I worked on a large scale DOS-era software virtualisation project where we moved ~20K users onto a Windows + Citrix platform.
Respectfully: How many lives would you have extinguished had your new system failed? How many failure modes did you encounter during your virtualisation project? How many external systems - which also relied on a very specific way of doing things and would have murdered people if talked to wrongly did you interface with?
No need to answer. We have all had such projects. We know things break before, during, and after the switchover. Only in some environments, systems absolutely cannot break, ever. Aviation is not your average 'let's get us a new mail server' migration project.
... running Windows 11. Flight delayed because Windows is updating.
"I stopped counting long ago, but there have been many, many attempts to try to modernize the US’s air traffic control (ATC) system over the years"
https://crankyflier.com/2025/05/12/the-us-government-tries-t...
I am sure you can find better sources as there are so many of them.
ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them.
If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.
I do not have enough knowledge to disagree on this. But I will say the FAA is still on floppy disks when the US Nuclear Arsenal moved off floppies back in 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy...
Yes, they have different requirements and yes, SACCS was using 8 inch IBM mainframe floppies from the 70s, but they are both 24/7 critical systems.
> If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.
The real answer is likely embarrassing incidents that came up during the start of this presidency. There is now political will to address it; instead of 'before' it becomes a problem. They are on Windows 95-it was budget issues.
Well this isn't very long in terms of overhauling safety-critical systems that have many decades worth of processes and infrastructure built up around them, is it?
The problem, once Congress gets wind of the amount of real money that will need to be spent, plus the time it will really take to develop and fully test, it is cancelled.
Of course I fully expect this to be TIP (Test in Production), thus for maybe 10 years, flying in the US could be very dangerous. Lets hope the pilots will be able to manually avoid other planes.
https://www.navcanada.ca/en/news/news-releases/nav-canada-an...
https://apnews.com/article/faa-firings-trump-doge-safety-air...
I've worked around some of these programs. I've had visibility into some of them for 15 years over which there has been zero forward progress despite unreasonably large amounts of money being spent. It is no secret why those programs are permanently broken but no one wants to have that conversation.
burnt-resistor•7h ago
Let me complain you about how error-prone and unreliable are real floppy disks. ):
skissane•6h ago
Yes, but if it is just a PC running Windows 95, likely simpler to get the software working under newer Windows, or if worst comes to worst, keep Windows 95 and stick it in a VM. I doubt there is any specialised hardware on the Windows 95 machines, the specialised hardware is likely connected to something else.
The use case where physical floppy emulators really shine is with much more exotic legacy systems. Some years ago there was a furore that the US nuclear arsenal was still being managed using 8-inch floppy disks (used in IBM Series/1s, 16-bit minicomputers from the 1970s). USAF was proud to publicly announce they’d successfully transitioned the US nuclear arsenal to be floppy-free. I don’t know if they said publicly exactly how they did it, but I suspect they kept the Series/1 minicomputers and just replaced the 8-inch floppy drives with hardware emulators (which probably each cost an utter fortune when you add up the premiums anyone will charge for it being the military, being highly classified, and above all being related to glowing things that go boom)
looofooo0•6h ago
hulitu•1h ago
famous last words. /s