FAA Administrator Blakey Reduces Safety In The Name Of Procedural Conformance

Jim Burns wrote:
Ok, Newps... you're killing me with curiosity... how does the electronic
"hole in the floor" work?

Simple. We've eliminated the hole. Yep, we've replaced the notoriously
unreliable gravity with tens of thousands of dollars worth of electronic
equipment. At the new place all strips will be printed with a bar code,
just like at the grocery store. When the ground controller reads a
clearance he scans the strip and that loads it into the tower
controllers computer. When the tower controller launches an IFR
airplane he holds the strip under a bar code reader mounted at his
position and that causes a strip to be printed out for the radar
controller with the heading that the tower controller entered on his
keypad. An unbelievable waste of money when a simple hole in the
console has worked perfectly well for the last 30 or 40 years.