FAA Begins Replacing 1980s-Era Floppy Disk Systems at Air Traffic Control Facilities With New E-IDS Display

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that the Federal Aviation Administration is rolling out the Enterprise – Information Display System (E-IDS) to replace four legacy systems dating back to the 1980s. Those systems rely in part on floppy disks to hold weather and other critical information, and they are in more than 400 FAA facilities.

E-IDS is a digital display board that puts operational information in one place for controllers: equipment outages and disruptions, air traffic conditions, weather impacts, restricted airspace schedules and advisories. It will also change how Pilot Reports (PIREPs) and Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) are collected and distributed.

The first five sites to receive the upgrade are Atlantic City International Airport, Nashville International Airport, Greater Rochester International Airport, and data processing hubs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City. The FAA plans to install E-IDS at 435 sites by the end of 2028.

Duffy said, "Good news America: floppy disks are out, 21st century tech is in." FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the system will let controllers instantly share critical flight alerts, restricted airspace schedules and pilot reports across the National Airspace System.

The initial E-IDS contract was awarded to Leidos, a defense contractor based in Reston, Virginia, in August 2020, during the first Trump administration. Critics note that the project is a years-old procurement and not a new initiative, and that it does not address wider problems in the system.

A September 2024 Government Accountability Office report found that 90 percent of 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.

The FAA says it has also replaced 69% of copper wires, installed Surface Awareness Initiative systems at 143 towers, transitioned 26 towers to electronic flight strips and installed 226 IP voice switches.

Information displays inside control facilities are rarely what airspace users notice, but they are where weather, outage and airspace-restriction data reach controllers. Replacing four separate legacy systems with one board changes how that data is consolidated, and it also changes how PIREPs and NOTAMs flow, which touches the products business-aviation flight departments and dispatchers rely on for trip planning.

The timeline is the practical constraint. Five sites come first and 435 are targeted by the end of 2028, so for several years the national system will run a mix of old and new tools. A contract awarded in August 2020 reaching its first installations now illustrates how long even a single modernization step takes at this scale, and the GAO's 2024 finding that 90 percent of critical infrastructure was due or past due for refresh frames how much remains outside this project.

The next milestones are the installations at the five named sites and the pace at which the remaining facilities follow toward the 2028 target.