FAA Begins Retiring Decades Old Floppy Disks from Air Traffic Control

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.

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.

> replacing outdated floppy disks that contain vital weather and other critical information with a streamlined, 21st-century system

What does this even… mean?

At the very least, physical media is airgapped. Floppies still aren't a good choice though, since they develop bad sectors so easily.

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

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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.

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.

hopefully not with pendrives

> 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

Out with FDD, in with GPT! (!)