"Ron Garret" wrote in message
...

Since you asked...

1. What hardware does the current system run on?


Old hardware.



What operating system does it use? Who wrote the software? What language
was
it written in? How is flight plan data stored? Is it on hard disks? In
a RDBMS? Flat
files?


Beats the hell outta me.



2. How many flight plans per day does the current system handle?



Nationwide? I suppose it depends on how you count them. A single long
range flight plan might be processed by half a dozen center computers, do
you want to count each one?



3. How sophisticated is the current system in terms of auto-routing and
capacity management? Can it figure out that there are, e.g. too many
planes headed for a particular navaid at a particular altitude and route
new traffic some other way?


Not the Flight Data Processing computer, it just processes flight data,
giving each controller along the route the necessary information.



4. What actually happens when I'm waiting for my IFR release? Is the
computer involved, or is it just the controllers at that point?


Most likely just the controllers involved.