US will retire floppy disks used in air control systems

It may seem like a joke, but it's not. The country that put a man on the moon, invented the internet and is at the forefront of artificial intelligence, still uses floppy disks to help control air traffic.

That's right. Floppy disks! Those little plastic squares that we put on the computer in the 1980s and 90s. And that, from time to time, gave that desperate warning: “Reading error”.

The floppy disk is known to generations Z and Alpha as that small symbol for "saving" a virtual file.

The American aviation agency, the FAA, announced that it will retire floppy disks. But no rush. The process should only be completed at the end of 2028. In other words, there are still two years left for the small objects to finally land.

For those born in the smartphone era, an explanation is worth explaining. The floppy disk was a technological revolution.

It appeared in 1971. The first ones were huge. Then they came in a smaller version and, finally, the small ones, which became a symbol of computing.

The most popular one held just 1.44 megabytes. Today, a single photograph taken on a cell phone can take up several times that space.

Floppy disks practically disappeared more than 25 years ago. But they survived in some unlikely places.

Until 2019, the American military still used giant floppy disks, in a system linked to the nuclear arsenal. And now, we discovered that they were also resisting in air traffic control facilities.

They are used in legacy systems that provide weather information and other important data to controllers.

But after all, why did such an old technology continue to be in use for so long? According to a report from the US Congressional oversight body, the systems still used by the FAA had an interface from the 1980s and depended on manual updates.

Modernizing this structure took decades and maintenance became increasingly difficult.

After more than half a century of service, the floppy disk will finally grow wings and disappear into the clouds. Not in the digital cloud. In the real cloud.