US ATC Controllers & Engineers - FAA Modernization Resilience

A post has been doing the rounds arguing that the FAA should stick with the floppy disks. The thinking is simple. Old systems are isolated. You cannot push a bad update into something that is not connected. The 2024 CrowdStrike outage proved that modern systems can fail at scale while older disconnected systems keep running. Fair point. But there is another side to it. In January 2023, the NOTAM system failed because of damaged database files. No cyberattack. No hostile actor. The system failed on its own and US air traffic was grounded for more than two hours. That matters. If a system can stop national aviation because of its own age or fragility, I am not sure we can call that resilience. The absence of an attacker is not the same as the presence of safety. The GAO has already said that 51 of 138 FAA systems are unsustainable. Some are decades old. Some are approaching fifty years. Spare parts are hard to find. That is not a long-term plan. One thing worth clearing up too. SMART is not replacing the floppy disks. SMART is the $875 million traffic flow platform designed to help predict congestion, scheduling and routing problems before aircraft push back. The old controller-facing systems are part of a separate modernization effort. Different problem. That said, the concern about modernization is still valid. Every new connection creates another possible failure point. Every cloud dependency means somebody else’s outage can become yours. We see the same thing in maintenance. Paper records were slow and difficult to search, but they could not all disappear because a server went down. Digital records are better in almost every practical way. Until the system is unavailable. The best operators are not the ones who refuse to modernize. They are the ones who ask: What happens on the bad day? Who can still work? What can still be accessed? What is the fallback? That is the real issue here. Not whether the FAA should modernize. It has to. The question is whether the new systems are being built with failure in mind. Old systems fail one way. Modern connected systems fail another. The job is to understand both and make sure aviation can keep operating safely when either one goes wrong. I would really like to hear from controllers and ATC engineering people on this. Is the resilience of the legacy system real, or are we just looking at an outage that has not happened yet? Raymond D. Johnson Founder and Author, GroundTruth Aero Technical Director of Maintenance and Engineering, AATI groundtruthaero.org #Aviation #AirTrafficControl #FAA #Cybersecurity #LegacySystems #GroundTruthAero ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.