Ancient US Air Traffic Control Systems Won't Get a Tech Refresh Before 2030 (theregister.com) 34
The FAA's air traffic control systems are significantly out of date and won't be updated until the 2030s, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). The Register reports: In a report released Monday, the GAO said that 51 of the FAA's 138 ATC systems -- more than a third -- were unsustainable due to a lack of parts, shortfalls in funding to sustain them, or a lack of technology refresh funding to replace them. A further 54 systems were described as "potentially unsustainable" for similar reasons, with the added caveat that tech refresh funding was available to them. "FAA has 64 ongoing investments aimed at modernizing 90 of the 105 unsustainable and potentially unsustainable systems," the GAO said in its report. "However, the agency has been slow to modernize the most critical and at-risk systems."
The report said the seemingly perilous status of 17 systems was "especially concerning" as these are deemed to have critical operational impact at the same time as being unsustainable and having extended completion dates -- the first of them won't be modernized until 2030 at the earliest. Others aren't planned to be complete until 2035, and four of the 17 "most critical and at-risk FAA ATC systems" have no modernization plans at all. Of the systems on the list, two are more than 40 years old, and a further seven have been in service for more than 30 years.
The report said the seemingly perilous status of 17 systems was "especially concerning" as these are deemed to have critical operational impact at the same time as being unsustainable and having extended completion dates -- the first of them won't be modernized until 2030 at the earliest. Others aren't planned to be complete until 2035, and four of the 17 "most critical and at-risk FAA ATC systems" have no modernization plans at all. Of the systems on the list, two are more than 40 years old, and a further seven have been in service for more than 30 years.
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On the plus side, we could say it matches perfectly flying with Boeing and at least the pair makes an homogeneous, thus less disparate flying environment reducing the risks inherent of component mismatchs! /s
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Yeah, let Boeing work on it instead.
Windows 95 (Score:2)
Next time you fly remember the ATC software is running on win95 in some areas.
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I never understood why anyone outside Gamers would use WIn 95 for anything given that NT 4 was out in 1996 and NT 3.51 was before that.
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I never understood why anyone outside Gamers would use WIn 95 for anything given that NT 4 was out in 1996 and NT 3.51 was before that.
Better DOS compatibility. If I paid $$$$ for a DOS-based CAD system that wouldn't run under anything that wasn't 100%-DOS-compatible, I'd be running it either under an emulation environment or natively under DOS or Win95/98/ME or a DOS clone. If it were 1995, that would mean running it natively.
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Or OS/2, which is what I used in places where DOS was a concern back in those days.
Re: Windows 95 (Score:3)
NT 3.5.1 wasn't all that great. NT was getting close to ready, but needed more compute power than a lot of organizations were willing to pay for on their desktop.
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Next time you fly remember the ATC software is running on win95 in some areas.
Not a problem. My income-tax suite runs just fine on mid-20th-century tech, namely, a ballpoint pen and paper.
As for Windows 95 tech: Just keep it off the internet* and don't make any changes that haven't been thoroughly tested. But since this is air-traffic-control, I hope they would be doing that anyways.
* Gateways that allow very limited data to cross from the internet to the ATC and back under tightly-controlled circumstances are/should be allowed, but only where necessary, where the interface is simp
Re: Windows 95 (Score:2)
Gateways with those kind of restrictions are common in DoD systems where they are called "guards".
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Traditionally, it's been IBM mainframe hardware.
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Next time you fly remember the ATC software is running on win95 in some areas.
Running TRACON, no doubt.
Re: Why unsustainable? (Score:2)
If it dates to the 80s, it was probably written in Ada and meant to run on a DEC Vax or something.
Back then, interoperability over different computer architectures wasn't quite a thing yet.
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If it dates to the 80s, it was probably written in Ada and meant to run on a DEC Vax or something.
If it was designed to run on a DEC Vax, then it should've been designed with the ability to replace DEC Vax hardware with either factory-replacement-parts or suitable* aftermarket or custom-made parts as they wore out, or designed with a fixed lifetime with a plan to replace it well before the lifetime ended.
* "suitable" doesn't have to mean "identical" or even "remotely similar" - replacing a bank of DEC VAX tape drives with a single aftermarket compatible tape drive and as many "virtual tape drives" with
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There were several "Vax on a chip" microprocessors.
I don't know if they are still available since it's now much easier to emulate.
A Raspberry Pi can easily emulate a Vax, with far better performance than the original.
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The problem with emulation in cases like this isn't about execution speed, but with the accuracy of emulating the hardware, including all the quirks, as well as take into account timings etc that the software was built around. That kind of accuracy tends to slow things down a LOT, and in between corporate cost-benefit analysis, and the sadly widespread culture of not-new-and-shiny-so-ignore-it, you don't get that much development in regards to these things.
Should just cancel it then (Score:1)
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Two trips per year per person max. But don't worry, you'll be able to buy someone else's trips from them.
That's 16 billion trips, if everyone who doesn't fly sells their "2 trips" on the open market.
Re: Should just cancel it then (Score:2)
That is horse shit
No big deal (Score:2)
Thankfully most of our airplanes are Boeing aircraft which are known for their highly reliable operation so the occasional ATC glitch should be fine.
time to give amtrak priority it has by law (Score:1)
time to give amtrak priority it has by law
Ancient Technology (Score:2)
an Ancient air traffic control system should work better than a human designed one, but you'd have to have someone with the ancient gene (eg John Sheppard or Jack O'Neil) to operate it.
There's an app^H^H^Hshot for that (Score:1)
but you'd have to have someone with the ancient gene
There's an app, er, a gene therapy [fandom.com] for that.
Not discussed was whether the ATA gene is Serial or Parallel.
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No, but a highly motivated team of top experts who were free to solve the problem without bureaucrats and silly rules could get it done quickly and efficiently
Fortran Galore! (Score:2)
I'll bet some AI system could solve this issue in minutes by rewriting everything in Rust.
Does the EU have a solution? (Score:2)
Maybe it is time to out-source rather than reinvent.
I'm sorry for America (Score:2)
Let's face it: the corporations that own the courts, government and people of the United States have sucked the nation dry. Most Americans live from paycheque to paycheque in a country with infrastructure that would make a Third World dictator blush.
Dear god, people, get your scumbag politicians back under control. You're exporting your garbage to Canada now. Our next government will probably be led by a filthy little Conservative named Pierre Poilievre (we call him Little PeePee), funded by the same ri
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That won't happen until US-ians stop voting for monopoly-interests ^H^H^H^H anti-socialism scare-tactics, 'muh free-dumbs' and celebrities who've done nothing and plan to do more of it.
Politicians won't care; until campaigning affects their bank-balance less than their pay-cheque, voters care about long-term maintenance, government policy declares tax-cuts (to the rich) are bad.