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

If this is the case, why was an airport knocked offline due to a cut fiber optic? A safety focused system would have a backup system say satellite or mobile 4G/5G. But they didn't have such.

This isn't about safety. Its about bureaucracy wrapped up as safety.

In 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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

https://sysatl.com/ids4/

That was the backup connection. The primary failed, and concurrently the backup had been severed by a construction crew.

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.

Instead, the United States government should have continued the policies and values that led to Next Gen, ERAM, STARS, and AAS.

Another trump tell… Lame acronym.

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.