flying reading of floppy media

[Al Kossow]

 > A thick rigid base and a very thin,
 > hard cap, with the media immobile between them.  The whole assembly
 > would turn in the reader.  I don't know whether the media could actually
 > be read through that

It was possible to do this. Univac metal tape reels actually had a spool of
mylar tape to isolate the metal tape from the heads, for example.
There would be a lot of loss in the transducer, though, which you may be
able to compensate for by using a magnetorestrictive instead of inductive head.

I haven't pulled apart an Iomega bernolli drive to see if you could fly a
5" floppy over the plate and use the head in it for recovery.