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.
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 Commodore Amiga 500 floppies from the late 1980ies still work. I went nostalgic a couple months ago, booted about eight of those floppies and all worked.
They were probably kept dry the hole time, but I did move several times, they were in boxes in cellars and in garages.
They absolutely mog the cancerous garbage that is NAND flash memory in terms of data retention. The fact that you can pick an 1980s floppy from the junk room and read it is telling. Meanwhile your average TLC SSD will probably get wiped in 3 years if kept in the drawer, and a QLC will get wiped in 1 year.
Reliability wise floppies are also better: flash memory leaks electrons naturally and gets shredded by radiation events, with temperaure accelerating these processes. Meanwhile magnetic disks are not altered by any normal magnetic field you could produce at home.
> disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long
You really have no idea what you are talking about. It's normal for floppies, especially 3.5" to last decades just sitting on a shelf. I've got 5.25" floppies from 1984, and they boot just fine on my old apple //e.
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.
>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.
>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.
There is a strong difference between an airport going down and ATC causing and accident.
Uptime isn't safety, they have very orthogonal characteristics.
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".
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
It's not a serious statement. It's just something that people feel the need to add to their posts on certain message boards, including HN. The biggest tell is they never EVER mention President Trump by name or even the less specific "Trump administration". It is always "the current administration". You'll see it here dozens of times a week, that exact same phrase from a multitude of posters using it in the same way. You'll never get a good faith answer to your question because the statement itself was made for performative reasons and not for fostering serious discussion. Now that you know, you'll be surprised how much that exact phrase "the current administration" is used in this manner, not just here, but on public message boards across the internet.
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.
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.
Anyone who's worked around systems in that category knows that the fact that they're replacing floppies is more scary than the fact that they're still using floppies.
Yes, the system is old and warty, but we know it. It's old Jim the warthog.
I have absolutely no understanding of ATC systems, though I would’ve thought that having a well established and (I would assume at this point) robust process of using a somewhat ancient media would reduce the attack vector of anything malicious finding its way into ATC systems.
I would love to know how often floppies are used day to day in ATC to warrant this?
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
Agree. For a purpose-built system that is only used by trained professionals, being "up to date" really means nothing. There's only fitness for purpose.
But the cost of switching -- mainly thoroughly certifying the replacement system, retraining, and the risks of an error happening during one of those processes causing a catastrophe -- that's real.
There's no point in upgrading the storage mechanisms of arbitrary systems, or completely redoing the whole system from scratch on new hardware which would be the case here, unless it yields measurable improvements in fitness for purpose to balance against the switching costs.
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.
Same. Over and over again. Every time, learning new things. And then trying to port things from one system to another is how I became a disciplined cross-platform systems software developer. And then, when C was kind of new, I bought a compiler instead of drugs and booze, like my peers at the time. Oh, what a world that has wrought!
>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.
> 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 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.
That is really not the worst thing about ATC. Far from it.
I have heard experienced pilots lamenting that we're still using voice on a scratchy radio, with garbled audio and people accidentally talking over other transmissions both being constant problems, for essentially all vital comms.
While I have no problem with keeping that as a fallback, there's zero reason why we shouldn't have, at least for airliners that have two pilots, a text-based communication system. We can still convert the text to speech in the cockpit to keep awareness the same, but we could play overlapping transmissions one after the other. And think of the other advantages. People wouldn't get callsigns wrong, could be alerted specially when their callsign was being talked to...
It's complicated because we will need to cooperate with all countries, but it's not like we don't have ICAO to work within.
We already have some systems in place for this, specifically stuff like ACARS and CPDLC. I suspect the issue is in congested terminal airspace, though; if you have many aicraft talking to an approach controller it is not uncommon to have multiple transmissoins at the same time.
However, approach phases are exactly the same periods when the pilots probably shouldn't be looking at their FMCs and texting. Voice communication is faster, and so is acknowledgement of voice commands, while allowing the pilots to concentrate on more critical controls. For example, in many airports it is possible to get departure clearances and such via text, but take-off clearance and taxi instructions will still be voice over radio.
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.
So my mother worked at a bank when she was in college. This is the 70s. Later in life she went back to work, in the 90s, at a bank. When the computers went down and they had to close the books on paper and she was the only one that knew how to do it.
There is something to be said for knowing how to deal with critical systems when the automation breaks.
My grandpa used to be a manual typesetter in the newspaper industry and retired in the 80s.
A few decades later, similar story, he came back to work part time, when desktop publishing was all the rage.
Welp, of course the computers went down.
So they fired up the old hot metal typesetting machines and he manually set all 100,000 words of that Newspaper by hand, and then they went to print using 19th century steam powered print lines.
Except, that story is total bullshit that I made up. Because "the computer went down" is something we can mitigate much easier than doing everything by hand.
Sometimes the old technology actually is objectively worse, inefficient, and obsolete. Like floppy disks, or manually having humans close the books at a bank.
Better in what way? They have avoided replacement specifically because they work extremely well and none of the alternatives have been demonstrably better.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> “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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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
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 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 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.
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 floppies outlived many many models of usb thumb drives. I can still read floppies I recorded 30 years ago.
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My Commodore Amiga 500 floppies from the late 1980ies still work. I went nostalgic a couple months ago, booted about eight of those floppies and all worked. They were probably kept dry the hole time, but I did move several times, they were in boxes in cellars and in garages.
> were never reliable
They absolutely mog the cancerous garbage that is NAND flash memory in terms of data retention. The fact that you can pick an 1980s floppy from the junk room and read it is telling. Meanwhile your average TLC SSD will probably get wiped in 3 years if kept in the drawer, and a QLC will get wiped in 1 year.
Reliability wise floppies are also better: flash memory leaks electrons naturally and gets shredded by radiation events, with temperaure accelerating these processes. Meanwhile magnetic disks are not altered by any normal magnetic field you could produce at home.
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my 1980s 5.25" disks still work. i'm surprised but they have laster a long time.
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> disks have a natural expiration date and it's not long
You really have no idea what you are talking about. It's normal for floppies, especially 3.5" to last decades just sitting on a shelf. I've got 5.25" floppies from 1984, and they boot just fine on my old apple //e.
42 years in my parent's dank midwest basement.
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I remember losing half the light cues for a show because we tried to reload from the 3.5" floppy and it was corrupted.
Your writing like checksums aren’t existing. They exist!
I’ve bought some 15 year old floppies recently. They work. Had just to learn, that formatting them is required. In handling they are like SD-Cards.
Which is far better than the CDs, DVDs, Bluerays or records (you now…this big black discs with a needle).
And you don’t have to worry about network attackers. And we checksum everything from the network. For good reasons.
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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.
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What would you have suggested in the 1980s instead of a floppy disk? And today?
If you have enough floppy disks they are a perfectly reliable solution.
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And yet they’ll replace it with some cloud-native monstrosity that will get hacked by an unhinged GPT.
Say what you will about floppies. There’s something to be said for a system that’s air-gapped by default.
>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 primary was being inspected and the secondary failed.
There were two independent systems.
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Ok but downtime isn't the same as failure. Downtime means planes can't take off. Failure means people die.
An more important question is what do they plan to replace it with?
>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.
There is a strong difference between an airport going down and ATC causing and accident.
Uptime isn't safety, they have very orthogonal characteristics.
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".
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The assumption that moving slower and more bureaucratically increases safety and reliability is one of the most harmful myths out there.
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The FAA doesn't run airports.
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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.
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.
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And "bureaucracy" really means "grift".
> 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.
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If you make a change and then your change leads to a plane crash that's bad for you.
If you don't make a change and then there's a plane crash that's not your problem.
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.
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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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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Aren't you making the exact same mistake with AI? What has been the worst problem caused by AI so far?
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is there any reasonable reason to still have the cryptic metar information sent to planes?
> 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.
It's not a serious statement. It's just something that people feel the need to add to their posts on certain message boards, including HN. The biggest tell is they never EVER mention President Trump by name or even the less specific "Trump administration". It is always "the current administration". You'll see it here dozens of times a week, that exact same phrase from a multitude of posters using it in the same way. You'll never get a good faith answer to your question because the statement itself was made for performative reasons and not for fostering serious discussion. Now that you know, you'll be surprised how much that exact phrase "the current administration" is used in this manner, not just here, but on public message boards across the internet.
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Do they still have those 68030 Apollo's ?
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.
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.
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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.
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If anyone wants to see the guts of an 8-inch drive and how complex it is check out this video from Adrian's Digital Basement.
https://youtu.be/hQY0DI7nKaM
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Anyone who's worked around systems in that category knows that the fact that they're replacing floppies is more scary than the fact that they're still using floppies.
Yes, the system is old and warty, but we know it. It's old Jim the warthog.
I thought humanity had stopped manufacturing floppy disks.
But yes, the dread of the inevitable bug filled replacement for Jim the Warthog is very real.
It could be the domino effect of the Japanese gov phasing them out ;)
I have absolutely no understanding of ATC systems, though I would’ve thought that having a well established and (I would assume at this point) robust process of using a somewhat ancient media would reduce the attack vector of anything malicious finding its way into ATC systems.
I would love to know how often floppies are used day to day in ATC to warrant this?
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.
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> replacing outdated floppy disks that contain vital weather and other critical information with a streamlined, 21st-century system
What does this even… mean?
zip disks.
That ungoldly click of death...
¡much confidence. fly yes!
https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/2026-04/M...
https://sysatl.com/ids4/
An DOT Inspector General progress report from 2024:
https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/library-items/FA...
Twin towers spotted
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
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.
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
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> 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.
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.
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.
Agree. For a purpose-built system that is only used by trained professionals, being "up to date" really means nothing. There's only fitness for purpose.
But the cost of switching -- mainly thoroughly certifying the replacement system, retraining, and the risks of an error happening during one of those processes causing a catastrophe -- that's real.
There's no point in upgrading the storage mechanisms of arbitrary systems, or completely redoing the whole system from scratch on new hardware which would be the case here, unless it yields measurable improvements in fitness for purpose to balance against the switching costs.
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.
Typing in the code from a listing is one way I inadvertently learned to program.
Same. Over and over again. Every time, learning new things. And then trying to port things from one system to another is how I became a disciplined cross-platform systems software developer. And then, when C was kind of new, I bought a compiler instead of drugs and booze, like my peers at the time. Oh, what a world that has wrought!
> Some day, I'll see the last one go.
Equally likely: they'll see YOU go. Pape... uhm I mean floppies are patient.
> 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.
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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.
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I’m surprised that they still find floppies to use considering the youngest floppy is now going to high school
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
That is really not the worst thing about ATC. Far from it.
I have heard experienced pilots lamenting that we're still using voice on a scratchy radio, with garbled audio and people accidentally talking over other transmissions both being constant problems, for essentially all vital comms.
While I have no problem with keeping that as a fallback, there's zero reason why we shouldn't have, at least for airliners that have two pilots, a text-based communication system. We can still convert the text to speech in the cockpit to keep awareness the same, but we could play overlapping transmissions one after the other. And think of the other advantages. People wouldn't get callsigns wrong, could be alerted specially when their callsign was being talked to...
It's complicated because we will need to cooperate with all countries, but it's not like we don't have ICAO to work within.
We already have some systems in place for this, specifically stuff like ACARS and CPDLC. I suspect the issue is in congested terminal airspace, though; if you have many aicraft talking to an approach controller it is not uncommon to have multiple transmissoins at the same time.
However, approach phases are exactly the same periods when the pilots probably shouldn't be looking at their FMCs and texting. Voice communication is faster, and so is acknowledgement of voice commands, while allowing the pilots to concentrate on more critical controls. For example, in many airports it is possible to get departure clearances and such via text, but take-off clearance and taxi instructions will still be voice over radio.
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.
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So my mother worked at a bank when she was in college. This is the 70s. Later in life she went back to work, in the 90s, at a bank. When the computers went down and they had to close the books on paper and she was the only one that knew how to do it.
There is something to be said for knowing how to deal with critical systems when the automation breaks.
My grandpa used to be a manual typesetter in the newspaper industry and retired in the 80s.
A few decades later, similar story, he came back to work part time, when desktop publishing was all the rage.
Welp, of course the computers went down.
So they fired up the old hot metal typesetting machines and he manually set all 100,000 words of that Newspaper by hand, and then they went to print using 19th century steam powered print lines.
Except, that story is total bullshit that I made up. Because "the computer went down" is something we can mitigate much easier than doing everything by hand.
Sometimes the old technology actually is objectively worse, inefficient, and obsolete. Like floppy disks, or manually having humans close the books at a bank.
Better in what way? They have avoided replacement specifically because they work extremely well and none of the alternatives have been demonstrably better.
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.
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.
I'm not sure I've ever laughed at a headline from a Hacker News post before.
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.
These are not serious people.
If it aint broke don't fix it
This is a headline from 1996?
Welcome to the 2000s. ETA: 2028.
wow never thought i would outlast them
I just hope they are not replacing the system with Claude
... and make it safe
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.
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?
Can we phase out pennies instead?
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.
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.
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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.
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Just turn WinRAR error correction up to max /s
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It makes me wonder: what gov't agency is still using punch cards.
> “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?
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.
arent they supposed to phase out punchcard computers first?
The folks over at The Onion are kicking themselves right now because they didn't think of this headline first.
> 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.
> 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.
They'll just switch to gold floppies
great thing to read before a flight
Next they will be migrating off Internet Explorer 6
hopefully not with pendrives
Zip Disks are the future. click click
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.
floppy boot sector viruses were common back in the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_(computer_virus) I had one infect my home pc called ripper
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.
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.
You could call it histrionic.
What is this, a joke‽
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alt link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/us-faa-says-phase-flo...
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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 would rather things be done "incompetently" than nothing being done at all.
> 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.
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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.
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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.
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Nothing being done at all means the system continues working as it is. Something being done incompetently means more people die.
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what an absolutely awful take.
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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 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
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Out with FDD, in with GPT! (!)