The Federal Aviation Administration is moving to retire the 3.5-inch floppy disks still used in parts of the nation's air traffic control system, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced Thursday. The replacement is the Enterprise - Information Display System, or E-IDS, which will be deployed across more than 400 air traffic control facilities. E-IDS consolidates real-time weather alerts, equipment outages, restricted airspace changes and pilot reports into a single digital dashboard, supplanting manual workflows and physical storage media.
Work has already begun at five locations: control hubs in Atlantic City, Nashville, Rochester, Atlanta and Salt Lake City. The FAA aims to have E-IDS in place at 435 facilities by the end of 2028. Duffy framed the change as a long-delayed modernization, saying in a release that floppy disks are out and 21st century technology is in.
The push is not a sudden development. The FAA awarded the initial E-IDS contract to Leidos, a defense contractor based in Reston, Virginia, in August 2020, during the first Trump administration, and the project has since moved through procurement, safety validation, testing and vendor timelines. Duffy, a former reality TV star and Fox Business host, has repeatedly held up floppy disks as a symbol of government obsolescence, displaying them at speeches and in television interviews while criticizing the FAA's continued reliance on copper wires and floppy disks.
The underlying problems extend well beyond aging media. A Government Accountability Office report from September 2024 found that 90 percent of the nation's critical air traffic control infrastructure was due or past due for a technology refresh. Nearly half of the 138 systems surveyed were considered unsustainable or potentially unsustainable because of funding shortfalls, insufficient maintenance expertise or a lack of spare parts. In recent years the FAA has drawn criticism over ground stops, close calls on runways, including one involving President Donald Trump, chronic burnout among air traffic controllers and high-profile software failures such as the 2023 NOTAM outage.
Duffy has argued that obsolete technology is not the only source of the disruptions. He has been lobbying Congress for an additional $30 billion on top of the $12.5 billion down payment he secured in 2025 for his air traffic control modernization plan. Under Duffy, the Department of Transportation has emphasized recruiting gamers for controller roles, and the administration is relying on technology industry allies including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to help address the system's problems.
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