When Boeing 747-400 pilots needed to update their navigation database as late as 2020, a technician would walk onto the flight deck with eight 3.5-inch floppy disks and feed them one at a time into a slot beside the captain's seat, because recertifying anything newer than the 1989 avionics would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars. (opens in new tab)

As recently as 2020, updating a Boeing 747-400’s navigation database meant a technician boarding the aircraft every 28 days with a sleeve of eight 3.5-inch floppy disks, sitting down in the captain’s seat, and feeding them one at a time into a drive mounted on the cockpit pedestal. The job took about an hour. Each […]