Boeing 747-400 aircraft were still receiving their crucial navigation database updates via a massive stack of 3.5-inch floppy disks well into the year 2020.

A closer look

Boeing 747-400 aircraft were still receiving their crucial navigation database updates via a massive stack of 3.5-inch floppy disks well into the year 2020. Mechanics had to visit these multi-million-dollar modern engineering marvels every 28 days and physically feed up to eight floppy disks into the cockpit's hidden disk drive to ensure the plane knew where airports were located. While passengers were in the cabin watching high-definition streaming movies on their iPads, the pilots up front were relying on storage media that most millennials haven't seen since they were playing Oregon Trail on a beige desktop computer. It is a deeply comforting thought for anxious flyers that the pinnacle of global air transport infrastructure was being held together by magnetic squares of plastic that hold less data than a single modern smartphone photograph