Posted on 03/06/2025 6:59:34 AM PST by Salman
Over a third of the USA’s air traffic control systems are in an “unsustainable" state, and the FAA's decades-long project to upgrade them is not going well.
That concerning situation was described on Tuesday by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) in testimony to the House committee on transportation and infrastructure’s subcommittee on aviation.
The auditors at the GAO examined 138 ATC operations and found that 51 (37 percent) were considered "unsustainable" by the FAA and 54 (39 percent) were "potentially unsustainable."
The FAA deployed six of the ATC systems 60 years ago, and 40 are 30 years old. 72 have been in operation for over two decades. Spare parts are scarce, and trained personnel to maintain them are becoming harder to find.
"The FAA’s reliance on a large percentage of aging and unsustainable or potentially unsustainable collection of ATC systems introduces risks to the FAA's ability to ensure the safe, orderly, and expeditious flow of air traffic," said Heather Krause, the GAO's managing director of physical infrastructure, in testimony to US House reps.
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(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.com ...
PDP 11s or HP 1000s ?
One of my first computers was the Coleco Adam which ran the Zilog Z80 and three 6801 support processors..........
Do be careful about the source of this “data”. IT shops love to tout how their systems will solve everything — until something breaks and they are no where to be found.
Brits tried several times to “update” their NHS systems. Blew thru billions of pounds.
They'll need to create the new system while the existing one is still working and then transition control. Manpower may almost double during the buildup and changeover.
Sometime in the midst of Space Shuttle operations they had to change out the computers in the launch stand, networking center, and fire control room because spare parts for the PDP-8s and PDP-11s had become depleted world wide.
Normal people will be frozen out of air flights.
Prepare accordingly.
I worked at a place the removed what I had thought was the last PDP11 running in the US.
Really remarkable.
I guess I’m a squeak older than you. I started out on the IBM 1130, then went through a lot of microcomputers and mainframes in Huntsville. Following that, I went to Intel 4004, 4040, 8008, 8080, and 8085. Only then did Z80 stuff come along. I had to write a cross assemblers for the Computer Automation Alpha LSI-2 in order to make good progress with all of those suckers!
That is the hidden cost of automation.
At some point, it is junk. The machines may still work, but they are not able to be replaced and there may not be a “new’ option available.
A lot of robot assemblies are in this trap. The old computer is down, and there are no new options.
I'm sure those could be found as well. I did some inertial guidance system work on an HP-2116. That was not my favorite minicomputer.
Oh my! I'd love to have snatched one of those.
It is at last report running a glass cutting line in Brazil.
Was fascinating to work on something older than I was.
You have that right!
There are seven IBM 1130s in the world that still work, but no IBM 360/370s. I believe there are two IBM 1400s in working condition.
Circuit boards de-laminate and insulation on wire harnesses rot into oblivion. The transistors and ICs will fail with no replacements. Even light bulbs have no available replacements.
Apparently didn’t work out so well. IIRC Lockheed was some how involved as well.
When I got into my A7 squadron, they were still flying the A-7B Cosair which had a TF-30 engine in it, and was considered on the low side for performance in the A-7.
That was the same engine that was used in the Tomcat, and was basically not a fighter engine, but a bomber engine, so it didn't perform the same way (responsiveness-wise) that they would expect a fighter engine to respond. I believe the same engine was used in the F-111 (engines were designed for the F-111) and was subject to the same issues.
The F-14D had the GE F110 engine which was apparently pretty good, and made the plane truly awesome.
When we upgraded our A-7B Corsairs to A-7E Corsairs, it used a Rolls Royce-Detroit Diesel Allison TF-41 engine which gave improved performance, but had issues with turbine blade cracks. It was a higher bypass turbofan engine, and because of the turbine crack issue, the engine used a thermocouple-limit mechanism (a governor on the temperature at the outlet of the turbines (EGT) so if the temperature got too hot it would cause the engine to lose power and reduce the temperature or keep it steady. That helped with minimizing the turbine cracks.
As an aside, the TF-41 engine was also used in the Royal Navy F-4 Phantoms which they flew into the 1990's.
Every x amount of flying hours (maybe 500, I don't remember exactly) we had to remove a fuel nozzle and feed an optical borescope into the combustion can, feed it back to the turbine, and examine the turbine blades individually for cracks. One person would operated the borescope and examine the blades, and at their command, someone else would give a turn to the turbine with a giant ratchet wrench attached to the gearbox so more blades could be examined.
We had a guy who fed the borescope in a little too far, and when he told the guy to advance the blades, it simply chopped off the end of the optical borescope. Someone once told me those borescopes cost something like $50K-75K in 1970's money!
My last job before I got out was to work with Detroit Diesel Allison to install an Inflight Engine Condition Monitoring System (IECMS) which was a new thing for combat planes at that time. We were a pioneering squadron. Detroit Diesel Allison specially installed all kinds of sensors on the engine, and figured out how to write them to a recording tape (a metal cube about 3 inches to a side) so they could try to predict in advance when a plane might be developing problems that could result in a loss of an engine. They recorded exhaust gas temps (EGT) vibration, airspeed, RPM, throttle position, altitude, and so on.
When every flight came back and landed on the ship, I had to be there to pull out the big heavy recording tapes, put a fresh one in, and record and manually reset any alarm flags on a analog visual indicator.
The parachute riggers made me a special bandolier for the flight deck that I could carry six of the tape cartridges in.
I then took the tapes down to a special compartment, hooked them up to a Digital PDP-11 computer, download them and make a special paper tape record of the flight (it was so primitive by today's standards, it was a roll of tape maybe an inch wide, and as you transferred it to the tape it made a pattern of holes in the paper roll of tape that could be played back!
I had a special program where, if I saw any issues, I could choose the appropriate parameters in the program that would best display the issue, set the axis correct to best display them on a paper graph, print it out and give it to the maintenance officer and the Detroit Diesel Allison representative.
For example, if a vibration flag was triggered in the plane, I would read the tape, select the RPM, EGT Vibration level from the appropriate sensor and throttle position, then plot and print them.
It was very heady stuff then. Of course, all of this is completely standard on all military aircraft now I presume, but in the late 1970's...it was pretty cool.
Here is a link to a technical article, and shows a depiction of my squadron's plane at the time (1978): A-7E/TF41 Engine Conditioning Monitoring System
Funny...as I used a command line interface to enter the parameters to be plotted, I would occasionally mistype something, and it would spit back "PARAMETER INCORRECT-REENTER PARAMETER"
One day, I kept reentering the wrong thing and after the fourth or fifth time, the program spit back "PARAMETER INCORRECT-ARE YOU IN THE US MARINES?"
When I got it wrong again, it said "PARAMETER INCORRECT-WHAT IS ON THE END OF YOUR ARMS SHITFINGERS?
As I continued to deliberately make mistakes, it spit back ever increasing obscene and abusive responses to my mistakes! I thought it was hilarious!
Someone, somewhere had a sense of humor!
Some programmer had a ball!....................
My brother worked at DEC back in the 70s and 80's, and he related a story once about a high end international customer who had a problem with one of their systems, and as all the high-powered people clustered around while engineers tried to figure out what was going on, the system began degrading in front of their eyes, until finally, it came to the end of a command line where they could go no further, and the terminal said "Computer go bye-bye."
The customer's team, looking on, was enraged.
Digital immediately located the programmer and fired him.
Very cool! Thanks for sharing that!
I put graduated error messages in a system I did for NASA. They got downright pissed.
Sigh...I like them, and always get tickled when I see them, but...I suppose I might feel differently if my career was disintegrating before my very eyes and that message was the exclamation point at the end!
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