Airlines Are Still Using Floppy Discs?

A business owner who says he’s “the last man” still selling floppy disc – the bygone computer technology that was thought to have gone the way of the 8-track – says that airlines are among his biggest customers.

Wait, what?

Yep, it’s true, according Tom Persky, founder of floppydisk.com, who was quoted in a great article on Business Insider based on Persky contributions 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, in an interview from the book published online in Eye On Design last week. “These are people who use floppy disks as a way to get information in and out of a machine. Imagine it’s 1990, and you’re building a big industrial machine of one kind or another. You design it to last 50 years and you’d want to use the best technology available.”

The biggest culprit? Airlines.

“Take the airline industry for example,” he said. “Probably half of the air fleet in the world today is more than 20 years old and still uses floppy disks in some of the avionics. That’s a huge consumer.”

Right?

This will certainly come as surprising news outside of aviation circles.

The industry is already dealing with issues involving new technology, much less old – some might say ancient – technology.

Airlines are trying to adapt to the implementation of 5G wireless service at airports for fear it will interfere with airplanes’ communications systems.