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A comment on FAA Issues National Ground Stop. Parent comment

Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by 0cf8612b2e1e on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:23PM (#50490880)
Airplane software is some of the oldest on the planet, pre-dating anything that would be considered a best practice. When you see something weird in the space, assume it is because someone in the 1960s thought using more than two characters world be a profligate waste of space.

Unrolling these decisions is a monumental task given the decades of hardware already deployed in the field that will only be upgraded when the current unit fails.

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by lxgr on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:34PM (#50491038)
> When you see something weird in the space, assume it is because someone in the 1960s thought using more than two characters world be a profligate waste of space.

And with 1960s technology, this might just have been a very reasonable decision.

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Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop by 0cf8612b2e1e on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:38PM (#50491088)
Totally. Just some of those decisions put awkward constraints when the hardware is now a million times more capable.
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