from Hacker News

Boeing 747s receive software updates over floppy disks

by sleepyshift on 8/10/20, 2:24 PM with 162 comments

by ir77 on 8/10/20, 2:53 PM
i'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.
by mtbnut on 8/10/20, 8:00 PM
I 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.
by reaperducer on 8/10/20, 3:20 PM
Did 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.
by zdw on 8/10/20, 2:39 PM
While 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
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
by code4tee on 8/10/20, 3:22 PM
Not 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.
by inetsee on 8/10/20, 4:26 PM
At 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.
by Animats on 8/10/20, 8:41 PM
So? 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.
by cpgxiii on 8/10/20, 2:55 PM
Note 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.
by rwmj on 8/10/20, 2:51 PM
The 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?
by dis-sys on 8/10/20, 2:46 PM
US nuclear weapons relied on 8 inch floppy disks until 2019.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy...
by notacoward on 8/10/20, 2:41 PM
The 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.
by raxxorrax on 8/10/20, 2:32 PM
And I feared they would use 5¼" floppies, those were terribly unreliable.
by dekhn on 8/10/20, 3:23 PM
When 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.
by JoblessWonder on 8/10/20, 8:21 PM
I 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.
by lizknope on 8/10/20, 3:01 PM
The 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.
by dehrmann on 8/10/20, 4:18 PM
The 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."
by niffydroid on 8/10/20, 4:10 PM
I 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)
by commonturtle on 8/10/20, 6:45 PM
Only 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.
by lm28469 on 8/10/20, 2:58 PM
If it ain't broke, don't fix it
by ponker on 8/10/20, 8:36 PM
The 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.
by deeblering4 on 8/10/20, 2:44 PM
How many 747s are still in operation? I thought they were being phased out
by zikohh on 8/12/20, 8:16 PM
Is the 747 the only plane that uses floppy disks or are there newer ones that do have the same?