Posted by pseudolus 2 hours ago
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
What does this even… mean?
¡much confidence. fly yes!
https://www.oig.dot.gov/sites/default/files/library-items/FA...
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.
Instead, the United States government should have continued the policies and values that led to Next Gen, ERAM, STARS, and AAS.
If it was just two modern computers and transferring data between them, the floppy disk would have been dropped in a heartbeat. But it's the old computers still in the critical path that are holding everything back. And those are really hard to maintain. Last year we phased out a system that was dependent on computers from the mid-1990s, getting replacement parts was practically impossible, they mostly just don't exist. You'd buy old systems off ebay and hope that they had enough working parts to scavenge, and the right working parts.
EDIT: Light editing because I had some extra words.
It's better to test a replacement while you still have the time, than to risk rushing something else.
This one, where the tour stops are ATC data buildings, where they only stop in to swap out floppy disks for USB drives.
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.
Another trump tell… Lame acronym.