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.
I can see it already actually : "The FAA was working fine and yet they want these X billions to have shiny new silicon valley machines, paid to big tech by the tax payers"
As horrible as that sounds, I don't think many people would say that it couldn't happen.
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.”
Not to mention rampant anti-intellectualism
I would trust a floppy-powered Windows 95 system over the horror show that passes for common operating systems in 2025.
What will they think of next? Adding AI to the ATC system?
In my experience that's normally the fault of third-party software, and otherwise quite easy to determine and avoid/fix. Now OSes with more protections just hide those bugs, causing most software to regress to a barely-working state.
I ran 98SE as a daily driver from late 1999 until 2010, and it was reinstalled at most 3 times, not even coinciding with hardware upgrades.
95 and 98 and ME crashed on a regular basis. I specifically remember upgrading from ME to XP and being so happy with the massively improved stability of the NT kernel over the 9x kernels.
If you think that's 9x was stable and reliable, you may be thinking very nostalgicly.
As the article points out: the hardware is at risk of physically failing and it’s getting harder to replace like for like. That’s the reason for looking at an upgrade. Hell, even turning the machines off to replace them is a challenge since some systems need to run 24/7!
The most recent Dolphin Emulator post referenced a bug they had where memory cards were written to too quickly under the emulator (and even on actual hardware if you had memory cards that were sufficiently fast) which caused some games problems because they did not expect save files to be written so quickly. Imagine things like that, but where the worst case isn't having Wind Waker hang while saving, but planes crashing.
I am only aware of a single modern-ish motherboard with ISA, the MS-98A9, and it only supports Intel 3rd Gen Core series CPUs.
That said, if it was a large enough project, reverse engineering and re-implementing using modern components would likely be feasible. Turning each of these into network services handled by something more akin to a RaspberryPi could modernize the data sources while providing a sustainable and modular replacement strategy. The problem is that its not "sexy" enough to get a major government project, and it would not grease the correct palms that a multi-billion dollar next-gen complex proprietary replacement would.
That was cheaper at that time, than modernising that system. But it's clearly not long-term scalable.
I've heard of S/360s in KTLO mode in basements keeping banks running. Teams of people slowly crafting COBOL to get new features in at a cost of thousand of dollars a day each, and it "still works". But from a risk point of view, this is also ridiculous.
Safety critical systems have different economics. Yes, you can keep the floppy systems going, but the cost of keeping them going is rising exponentially each year, and at some point a failure will cost one or more airliners full of civilians and the blame will be put on not having a reasonable upgrade policy.
Sometimes you have to fix things before they stop working, or the cost is not just eyewateringly expensive in terms of dollars, but of human lives too.
Costs are rising heavily. IBM sold off most of that business, to people who don’t really want it as the skill base to support it is retiring and it’s too expensive to easily replace. This has been going on for a couple of decades, but it’s now gaining more and more pace.
Every year you delay is pushing that lower, and then there's whether the funding is available because you're in fairweather economic conditions or if crisis will happen concordantly with some other crisis (I.e. do you want to be stuck replacing air traffic control systems in a rush because some war has wiped out the floppy supply chain right as your air logistics is a critical issue?)
This whole thing is being done as a reaction to this video:
https://youtu.be/YeABJbvcJ_k?t=1540
The article completed skipped over this. This video was released literally a week ago and is completely mocking the FAA. Floppy disks are a big joke in this video.
Let me complain you about how error-prone and unreliable are real floppy disks. ):
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)
They only said a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution”. At least that's all I could find.[0] The article indicates that things get repaired down to the "component level", but specialist civilians.
And this bit was interesting as well:
"While SACC’s hardware is decades old, its software is constantly refreshed by young Air Force programmers who learn software development skills at Offutt’s Rapid Agile Development Lab. Most work on the software and interfaces seen by end-users like intercontinental ballistic missile launch crews, rewriting legacy code to make it more modern and sustainable, said Master Sgt. Travis Menard, 595th SCS’s programming section chief."
[0] https://www.c4isrnet.com/air/2019/10/17/the-us-nuclear-force...
Based on my experience with older government systems, this is likely an incorrect assumption. It was extremely popular in the 90s to create custom hardware that integrated directly to windows machines. I've had to reverse engineer so many drivers to upgrade old bespoke equipment to integrate with newer OSs
famous last words. /s
Tomshardware could do better reporting. There is no such thing as a computer that can’t fail, or a component that can’t be replaced. Does our reporter think the entire system was installed 25 years ago, and not one component has been replaced since? More likely it’s the ship of Theseus, and not one component is original.
I’ve replaced whole systems without interruption. You build in compatibility, then replace every computer one by one, and phase out use of the compatibility. It’s not rocket surgery.
Technical sites could be superior to the reporting in the general media on technical issues. It doesn’t have to be be stenography.
The other problem they are up against is that there are not many people around that still understand how it works or what the edge cases are.
Upgrading these large distributed systems can be painful. The NHS tried to upgrade their software, over £10 bn later and they abandoned it [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-...
Source: My cousin used to sell these systems back in the 90's and 00's.
They should realise that, unlike e.g. USB drives or SSDs or even HDDs[1], floppy disks are dumb raw media and cannot contain any "hidden" behaviour, and the failure modes are well-known.
Look up floppy boot sector viruses.
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.
The problem is that Eurocontrol (for example) has modernized their systems without much fuss, and UK NATS even has remote tower ATC now (https://www.youtube.com/video/Ii_Gz1WbBGA). It seems that FAA is stuck in the past, not just using old systems because it's reliable.
> Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them.
I would agree if the system is still fit and proper, but even in 2005 the ATC systems in the US is not really fit and proper that there has been multiple plans to rehaul the system. It is really miraculous that the only system failure happened in 2023 (NOTAM offline), but that's due to tireless dedication that's certainly burning unneded manpower.
Unlike in Europe where civil servants have the sway to just do it, it seems that the US is an expert in political bickering on things that aren't really political.
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.
"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.
https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_em...
Install and updates are via a registry based system, and it supports Windows, Linux, macOS - because its mostly written in Ada and R, as of 2012. (Most are running on top of Linux, as far as I'm aware).
No floppy disks, no underrunning DOS, etc.
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.
Any fancy new system of, for example an in-cockpit text based clearance/routing display using an LTE network, will need to be backed up with a process that can be accomplished with a pencil, a compass, and silence.
For anyone considering doing development in this space, sign up for a 20 hour instrument flying ground school, preferably one taught by a retired old fart rather than a 25 year old “instructor” with no actual experience.
That's a bit overkill in the world of DOGE. They'll just use some AI to design a system by a bunch of 20-somethings that have no experience whatsoever. Then, they'll come here and brag about it.
So OK, if you want to do development in this space, do learn about the US setup from a retired old fart who worked with paper strips and thinks the system should stay like this forever. But also learn about systems in Europe, Japan and other places; and realize that ATC can move away from the stone age. My 2c.
It would be interesting to know how things have changed since then, as obviously nearly 30 years has passed since that system would have been commissioned!
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.
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.
Still it removes more risks than it introdcues. (IF it tests out ok)
Though they have a stack of replacement PCs ready to go and lots of floppy drives and floppy disks to quikly replace whatever may break.
Writing new code from scratch, introduces a lot more risks. but also offers a promise of something much better.
"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.
I love this fixation on floppy disks. The article likely brought it up because it is a recognizably obsolete technology, but didn't cite why (or even if) it was a problem. I'm sorry, but a nightmarish software installation scenario doesn't cut it. It is highly unlikely that they are doing in situ software installations from floppy diskettes.
The danger in such armchair quarterbacking is that it undermines the authority of the agencies that are in charge of making decisions. If there are legitimate reasons to question their authority, by all means do so. Yet, when doing so, understand their requirements and provide evidence as to why their authority should be questioned. Also be prepared to be unsatisfied by some of their answers due to differences in perspectives.
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.
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.
> In May 2023, MartyPC became the first PC emulator capable of emulating every effect in the PC demo Area 5150.
... running Windows 11. Flight delayed because Windows is updating.
Presumably (hopefully) the existing system is airgapped in some way or otherwise restricted to communication with other ATC systems, so DOSBox-X running Win95/98[1] could act as a drop-in replacement for the software side...
I watched this happen with floppy media. When floppy disks were common in the 80's you had great quality disks from top tier Japanese manufacturers at low cost. Media failure was rare and you could rely on a disk day after day for years. Then, as demand for floppies dropped, and these manufacturers fobbed off legacy products to low cost manufacturers, floppy media became terrible.
By the mid to late 90's, floppy media bought retail was very unreliable. For a brief time I was salvaging stacks of disks that came with commercial software because the software vendors were still able to secure good media, while the retail blanks you found in stores was just this side of e-waste. I used them with expensive instruments that had integral (high quality) floppy drives, long after PCs stopped using them.
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.
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.
The EU has been almost single-handedly designing the international interoperability standards for the kinds of information that the US uses floppies to move around.
I'm not sure any country still remembers the lessons that would be useful for the US on this one situation.
disc - optical
disk - not optical
Eg.: floppy disks and DVD discs
As far as I can tell the only systems that use floppy disks are IDS-4 terminals, of which there are a couple hundred left in the US, the rest having been upgraded (to IDS-5 or similar systems) over the last 30 years.
I don't know if it is small regional airports with no money, large international airports with few moments of downtime time needed for the upgrade, a mix those two, bad luck with the bureaucratic wheel-of-priorities spin, or what.
But there's no context to any of these articles, only "FLOPPY DRIVES LOL" so I had to take the time to find out what systems were actually impacted.
I mean, it could have been an old HP Oscilloscope in a RF rack that used floppy drives to store images and log data, or it could have been the Master Control Program of the entire air traffic control network.
There's a slight difference in impact between those two.
It appears as though there are multiple competitors/replacements to IDS-4 so the solution is to cut a check and block off some time on the calendar.
edit: every single journalist who just grabs a couple of tweets, adds some commentary, and dusts off their hands muttering "job well done" should encased in a Lucite cube and displayed in the town square as an object of ridicule.
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.
There is also some work by the germans on moving the TID part to a web-based approach.
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.
YOLO i guess? :)
Hypothetically the nearby planes can detect that unresponsive plane on radar or other sensors, and try to react together as an intelligent swarm, to avoid it and let that plane land manually. But it’s not so simple. Planes are not loaded with full fuel tanks, only a bit extra. Some planes may have already underwent a go-around if the airport is busy. So it’s not just “land without crashing”, it’s also a prioritization issue.
IMO we certainly need humans in the loop, in a centralized fashion, to “orchestrate” a manual emergency landing if there is some critical cascading failure or bug in the software. I agree that in the happy path (99% of cases) it’s possible to automate it all. In theory.
Things get more complicated when you consider that small planes (flown for hobby, flight school, etc) have waaaaay less tech. That can’t work in some peer to peer fashion without a major upgrade to all those planes too. And the owners of those planes are not corporations making billions.
