Some Airlines Are Still Using Floppy Discs in the Cockpit
Nowadays most kids don’t know about CDs and DVDs. But if you think that’s an archaic storage device, you’ll be surprised to learn that many airlines are still using floppy disks.
Tom Persky, founder of floppydisk.com, revealed in an article on Business Insider that airlines are some of its biggest customers. Persky, who regularly repairs, recycles, and sells floppy disks to anyone who needs this the old technology, is contributing to a new book, “Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium,” by Niek Hilkmann and Thomas Walskaar.
“My biggest customers — and the place where most of the money comes from — are the industrial users,” Persky said. “Take the airline industry for example. Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in the avionics. That’s a huge consumer.”
In 2020, as the pandemic hit the whole world, British Airways retired one of its Boeing 747-400s. Security researchers at Pen Test Partner were able to do a quick walkthrough of the plane’s avionics and the flight deck and found a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive in the cockpit that is used to load critical navigation databases.
So even though floppy disks are considered an ancient technology where you can’t even store a picture taken with your cell phone, they are still used in many industries. And, as 20-year-old planes continue to fly, floppy disks will be aboard as well.
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