alt Hacker News> Why would they be using flight computers from before 2002?
Why would you assume they're not? I don't know about aircraft specifically, but there's plenty of hardware that uses components older than that. Microchip still makes 8051 clones 45 years after the 8051 was released.
That’s just wild to think about. We should all strive to build solutions that plague our descendants with their persistent utility.