Most of the companies still using floppy disks are small businesses or companies running tight margins who either simply never got around to upgrading their equipment, or found it too expensive to do so.
Davit Niazashvili, a maintenance manager at Geosky, a cargo airline based in Tbilisi, Georgia, still uses floppy disks to apply critical updates to two 36-year-old 747-200s, which were originally delivered to British Airways in 1987: “When an update is released, we need to download it to two 3.5-inch floppy disks. There are no computers with built-in floppy drives left, so we had to source an external one,” Niazashvili says. “Then we take the disks to the aircraft to update the flight management system. The operation takes about an hour.”
The updates contain essential data such as changes to runways and navigational aids, and are released every 28 days
