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Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks
- deeblering4 6y agoHow many 747s are still in operation? I thought they were being phased out
- dawnerd 6y agoPhased out for passenger service but being bought up by cargo carriers.
- newsclues 6y ago400ish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_747_operators https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Boeing_747_operators
- 0xcafecafe 6y agoLooks like a lot of them are cargo operators.
- ptmcc 6y agoPhased out for passenger service, but most of them will have long lives ahead of them as freighters where they still shine.
- raxxorrax 6y agoAnd I feared they would use 5¼" floppies, those were terribly unreliable.
- asplake 6y agoHa! I took boxes of scarily unreliable 8” floppies around the world in my first job working on aircraft simulators. More than 30 years ago though...
- dhosek 6y agoWhen 3.5" floppies (stiffies) were introduced, the big selling points were that (a) they could fit in a shirt pocket and (2) you could toss them across the room and they'd still work. At my first job, I kept a 5¼" floppy with "only copy of important data" written on the label hanging off my filing cabinet with a magnet.
- raxxorrax 6y agoThey were before my time, but I had an old drive I "examined" (destroyed) as a kid. It was unclear to me how such a large thing could hold so little memory.
- dhosek 6y agoYour younger self would have been fascinated by these: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3350.html https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_335...
- zdw 6y agoWhile this probably wouldn't pass muster with whoever certifies the 747's avionics, over in the retrocomputing world the solution to "It only uses floppies" has been the cheap Gotek floppy emulators that read from a USB stick running this free firmware: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy It has a great number of hardware mods that give it a display and a rotary encoder for better disk selection: https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki/Hardware-Mods https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy/wiki/Hardware-Mods
- S_A_P 6y agoAgreed. Not for avionics, but I cannot overstate how much of an improvement the Gotek/Lotharek/various other Floppy Disk/scsi to SD solutions are over finding NOS/still working storage media from that era. Ive a couple of old samplers from Emu and Ensoniq that I can continue using and not worrying (as much) about data loss and storage.
- alfalfasprout 6y agoIt wouldn't necessarily be a certification issue because updates to avionics bundles already require a checksumming/validation step. At worst, if it doesn't work you'd have to try again. However, adding in the USB support on some of these older devices might be a hassle.
- kayfox 6y agoThere are data loaders in the avionics world that use emulators, including ones which emulate floppies to load off floppy images.
- james_s_tayler 6y agoWe really should be updating our planes from S3 and running the entire fleet on Kubernetes with Kafka to handle all the Airline tickets and Redis to make it all go fast.
- notacoward 6y agoThe headline is misleading. According to the story text, the floppy is used to load a new navigation database, which is important to be sure but not a critical software update.
- WJW 6y agoNavigation is not critical? It seems like a pretty dangerous turn of events to try a low-visibility landing based on outdated navigation data.
- notacoward 6y agoNavigation data is important, which is why it's required to be refreshed within 28 days (this was a big worry during the recent Garmin outage BTW), but whether it's critical depends on often domain-specific definitions. AFAIK it doesn't meet that standard by either software or aviation standards. Also, it's definitely not software, so "critical software updates" is still incorrect.
- fallingmeat 6y agoIt's going to be required to fly legally, without a waiver. But in terms of the engineering development assurance required, typically it is more 'critical' than radios and less so than flight controls, engine controls or displays. Of course this depends on the safety analysis performed for the individual aircraft and intended operations.
- alfalfasprout 6y agoOn an airliner that can land in cat III approaches (ultra low visibility down below 100') then this data is critical since it's used in automated systems to help land the plane.
- bigphishy 6y agoThe headline is misleading in my view because loading navigational data is not the same as an update to the software code or operating system.
- reaperducer 6y agoDid it work? Yes. Was it secure? Yes. So, what's the problem? Updating 30-year-old gear with media from its era seems to make sense. If they were really wedded to digital media and needed to bridge that gap, Sony used to make a floppy disk that you could jam a memory stick into and it would read in a normal 3½ inch floppy drive. Very cool gadget.
- alfalfasprout 6y agoFrankly, provided you have error checking logic and don't store them next to a magnet... floppy disks are pretty damn bulletproof. I've had way more issues per-use reading a thumb drive or a CD/DVD-ROM than I ever did reading floppy disks.
- virtue3 6y agoplus CD-Rs might not last a decade!
- MaxBarraclough 6y agoWouldn't matter, we're discussing the storage medium used to perform the software update, not the format used to store the software in the aircraft.
- bartread 6y agoYep. Only a single datapoint, but I've had more issues with flash drives and USB sticks than I've ever had with floppies. CDRs are next level in terms of unreliability. Last year I discovered that almost none of the CDRs I'd burned in the early to mid noughties remain readable: simply had to destroy them.
- gspr 6y agoReally? I'm not doubting you, but I'm surprised. I only used them up until I was maybe 10 or 12 years old, but I still vividly remember often having to go through a couple of floppies from my drawer to find one that was working. And yelling at my little brother for putting a bad one back in the drawer. Are they really that robust? Was I just storing them stupidly maybe? Or maybe it was because all the ones we had were used ones from work.
- code4tee 6y agoNot surprising at all, and not really a problem either provided it works. More modern aircraft use things like USB sticks but often with old file formats and they can’t use a stick bigger than 2GB (actually hard to find if you want to buy one). Aviation engineering vastly prefers “old but works” over “new and fancy” and this article is just one detailed example of that.
- tomashubelbauer 6y agoI get why prefer old but works over new and fancy, but what about new and works? They could trial new technology for five or ten years in parallel with the old before switching gaining both the stability of old and proven and the future-proof-ness of "new and we think it will stick but it might not". The reason why it isn't done this way is probably cost, but at what point will the difficulty of sourcing the old tech and people who know how to use it become the more expensive option?
- vorpalhex 6y agoYou can still buy new, still shrinkwrapped, recent production floppy disks and new drives. I'd imagine if you're supplying parts for these, a warehouse with a stack of known-to-work floppy disk drives isn't much of an expense and certainly not difficult. Even if it became a problem, you reasonably have the margins to ask a manufacturer to setup an assembly line and run a new batch just for you - the only downside is that you're likely spending a lot of warehouse space to house the new parts.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoI remember reading a news story ~4 (or more?) years ago that the last manufacturer of floppy disks stopped making them. I’m not surprised to learn there’s still plenty in circulation, but I’m a little confused by “recent production”, unless my memory is just wrong...
- AlgorithmicTime 6y agoI'm fairly confident that newer aircraft are using newer, but works, technology. There's no reason to update the hardware on the 747 to use that technology, though. It'll be expensive to certify and retrofit.
- dekhn 6y agoWhen I worked for a major pharma company in the mid-to-late 2000s, their entire security system (IE, the door badge ACLs) was run on an old vaxstation that had its own full rack. It worked, they said.
- folmar 6y agoPolish railway operator had last of their 1970's ICT-1900 clone decommissioned in 2010.
- dis-sys 6y agoUS nuclear weapons relied on 8 inch floppy disks until 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy-disks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy...
- grishka 6y ago> The Air Force completed a replacement of the aging SACCS floppy drives with a highly secure solid-state digital storage solution in June So probably an SD card adapter.
- rwmj 6y agoThe Panavia Tornado fighter jet famously used cassette tapes for mission data. I guess aircraft are a product of their time and because of stringent safety requirements why try to update something if it works fine?
- stuff4ben 6y agoYep, same for the F-14... "...Then there was the computing power on the aircraft—or lack thereof. It was a Commodore 64 with wings on it ...For example: the mission computer loaded off of magnetic tape. That magnetic-tape computer had so little memory that its crew had to switch programs depending on what the jet was doing at the moment—the RIO would hit a switch to bring up the bombing program, and then after the bomb-dropping ended, they’d reload the air-to-air program" https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navy-deathmatch-f-14-tomcat-vs-fa-18-super-hornet-who-wins-74651 https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navy-deathmatch-f-14-...
- temac 6y agoThe F14 actually had a neat processor, with an architecture which remained classified for a long time (arguably far too long at the end, but it was plainly justified at the beginning) It was very old so, yes, I'm sure it had plenty of limitation though.
- ir77 6y agoi'm surprised that people are surprised by this. i work for aerospace, and this is fairly typical -- albeit not floppy disk examples, but we keep a bunch of old laptops running win 7 and other examples around, hound around for them and spare parts. these machines are off the network, etc. these systems were developed 20+ years ago and per contract the a manufacture is obligated to maintain them for the service life, so unless these are obsoleted these are to last 20-30+ years. the costs associated of porting all tools from win 7 to a newer system and re-verifying 50K+ test cases to do a similarity analysis run into astronomical in terms of $ and months (years) of work. no one really wants to poke that bear so you have situations like these.
- Nokinside 6y agoMS is extending extending free Windows 7 security updates to voting systems so that the US can get trough 2020 elections. There is still Itanium hardware running on Windows Server 2008 R2 (Same Kernel as Win 7) and it's supported until at least 2025. Safety critical and big enterprise software contracts are often written to keep the system running and updated with minimal changes and cost "Until the iron gets tired".
- fennecfoxen 6y agoThat says more about "the bear", and the overbearing nature of the compliance process, then it does about the wisdom or foolishness of relying on an aging hardware platform like the floppy more generally. Most industries don't deal with that. Maybe if this process had actually proved sufficient to prevent the 737 Max woes, we would pay it more respect?
- ashtonkem 6y agoArguably the 737 Max disaster was caused by an attempt to side step the regulatory process and get a new plane certified when it shouldn’t have. If the FAA hadn’t been so captured by Boeing, those two planes wouldn’t have crashed. All in all I can’t understand how one can look at the state of the airline manufacturing in the past 50 years and decide that less regulation is needed. Except for the MAX 8, phenomenal gains in airline safety have been gained over this time period, throwing all that away so that it’s easier to upgrade some old hardware seems incredibly foolish.
- cpgxiii 6y agoNote that the article covers the 747-400, which first flew in 1988. Using 3.5" floppies for updates made sense then, and aircraft avionics tend not to be updated unless absolutely necessary.
- lm28469 6y agoIf it ain't broke, don't fix it
- lizknope 6y agoThe article said the floppy drive is kept behind a locked panel. The article doesn't mention if the updates fit on a single floppy or a stack of 20 floppies. I don't see a fundamental problem as long as the data has checksums to make sure that it transferred successfully. I used to get tons of errors on floppy disks transferring data back in the 90's using Sun workstations and PCs. I started making my own checksums to make sure my transfers were correct.
- jandrese 6y agoI'd assume the data is sized by 1988 standards and fits on a small number of floppies, probably just one.
- notjustanymike 6y ago> a stack of 20 floppies Well now I'm having flashbacks of installing "Strike Commander".
- hinkley 6y agoI got so much exercise trying to install Slackware from >20 floppies. Disk 5 has read errors. go copy another, start over from disk 1. Disk 8 has a read error. (By the time I was done I didn't have enough disks, so I had to go to the lab in the middle)
- lizknope 6y agoI installed Slackware 2.1 with kernel 1.1.59 in the fall of 1994. I only had about 15 floppies between me and my roommate. I remember getting the "a" series of disks and then the "d" series for development and so on. I had to run back and forth to the computer lab about 5 times over the weekend.
- helb 6y ago> if the updates fit on a single floppy or a stack of 20 floppies The display says "INSERT DISK #1" so probably at least two, and it looks like there's a place for maybe a dozen under the "diskette stowage latch": https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/10/b744navdatafloppydrive.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/10/b744navdatafloppydrive.jpg https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/940263706444754945/photo/1 https://twitter.com/harrymccracken/status/940263706444754945...
- niffydroid 6y agoI cannot remember where I saw it a few days ago. They basically just use an emulator and a fake floppy disk, just like people could play cd's over a cassette player. I assume they don't have to go through certification for the loading device(the floppy drive), just the process of loading data instead (through the emulator)
- dehrmann 6y agoThe bigger story in the article is how little security review the software on these planes get > "Aircraft themselves are really expensive beasts, you know," said Lomas as he filmed inside the big Boeing. "Even if you had all the will in the world, airlines and manufacturers won't just let you pentest an aircraft because [they] don't know what state you're going to leave it in."
- hinkley 6y agoThe physical floppies use the same chain of custody that any other part of the system use. Every floppy has essentially been signed off dozens of times before it ever sees the insides of an airplane, and there is nowhere between the manufacturer and a flying plane where there isn't a person who is officially in charge of it. From what I understood, there is (was) a real danger of a part that was used in a stress test ending up in a bin full of spares. So every 'part' has an identifier, responsible parties, and a tagging system that keeps the streams from ever crossing. A floppy is physical, so they just did the same thing. Imagine trying to convince a bunch of people who have always ever done things physically to use electronic distribution.
- JoblessWonder 6y agoThe good news is that any new avionics system is going to have the ability for electronic distribution. Mostly due to reduced cost (cheaper than mailing out disks/CDs/DVDs) and better ability to correct any bad updates that are released.
- dTal 6y agoThat logic is baffling. If it's so easy to render a plane unsafe that they're frightened of letting someone pentest it, surely that would indicate a major problem that it's much better to find out about on your own terms?
- inetsee 6y agoAt one point in my career, I was working on maintenance software for the US Air Force's C-130 Cargo plane. Floppies weren't used to update the flight software (the Mission Computers didn't have floppy drives). A ruggedized portable computer was used to load the Mission Computer software over a wire connection. The software doing the loading was held to the same MIL-Spec standards as the flight software itself, and we spent a lot of time convincing the reviewers that the checksums used to verify the integrity of the load were sufficient to the task. If the software doing the load is performing its integrity checks to a sufficiently high standard, then I don't see why using a 3.5" floppy disk would be a problem.
- commonturtle 6y agoOnly slightly surprised; domains where failure is really expensive aren't likely to experiment with technologies. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I read something similar about the computers that control the US nuclear arsenal: They're extremely primitive and can only be updated by floppy disks.
- mtbnut 6y agoI worked in HAWK missiles in the Marine Corps for many years. This doesn’t surprise me one bit. In 1994, Block II launchers were still effectively using vacuum tubes. In fact, I still recall the one that faulted the most, from its label in the FM: relay K-9! Ninety-percent of launcher issues were attributed to that old relic of a tube. Then, in 1995, Raytheon came out with Block III updates, which replaced the entire trunk filled with hardware (about as crowded as a standard engine bay of a modern car) with about 3 PC graphics cards-sized modules, each with an NSN price tag of $170,000 per (don’t worry, you’re paying for the IP, not the physical cards themselves, which iirc were MIL-spec versions of your standed PCI card from back then). Made my job as a tech so easy, since the launchers never really broke down much after that, save for a hydraulic leak or two out in Dugway or White Sands during a shoot or Red Flag exercises at Nellis AFB. Didn’t see aliens out there but quite a lot of Soviet gear, which we acquired shortly after the USSR’s downfall. MiGs are really cool and reliable, though pilot/user comfort/convenience was not on their MVP list.
- echelon 6y ago> each with an NSN price tag of $170,000 per This is why we don't have decent public health care. That's obscene.
- crispyporkbites 6y agonot really - how many software and hardware engineers do you think you need for this? probably minimum 10, maybe 20-30 realistically. At SV salaries (you need the best engineers, right?) that's $9m USD/annum. You need to ship at least 50 of these devices to break even. To get a proper margin and cover all the other costs (manufacturing, sales, marketing, compliance, accounting, yada), you're probably going to need to create and sell a couple hundred, every year.
- pc86 6y agoIt depends what you mean by "SV salaries" but defense contractor developers can make a lot of money, especially compared to other software jobs in the NOVA/Maryland area (which are not paid nearly as well as SV).
- JoblessWonder 6y agoI work on aircraft that up until last year received updates via ZIP DISK. Do you know how hard it is to find a working ZIP disk and/or ZIP drive? Luckily we convinced the owner to update their avionics and now it uses... CDs? DVDs? A laptop? I honestly don't know. Something that isn't ZIP disks. We also have aircraft that need floppy disks.
- ponker 6y agoThe software that really matters, like really matters (not talking even about something like Google Search or Gmail)... is usually like this, since it's built to be almost never changed, since changing it is so high risk that it's almost never worth the cost.
- Animats 6y agoSo? There's nothing wrong with diskettes as a medium. They're not used much any more, but they work OK. F-16s still use PCMCIA cards to load combat flight plans. Obsolete, but small and reliable. Also big enough to handle on a flight line while wearing gloves. An SD card would be too small. A USB stick might accidentally get plugged into something it shouldn't be plugged into.
- outworlder 6y ago> but small and reliable. PCMCIA cards may be. Floppy disks are not reliable at all. But I assume there will be safeguards in place.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zikohh 6y agoIs the 747 the only plane that uses floppy disks or are there newer ones that do have the same?