> 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.

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.