---
title: "The FAA Is Retiring Its Floppy Disks, and Has Set Itself a 2028 Deadline"
description: "A Leidos-built display system will replace four legacy platforms at 435 sites, six years ahead of the schedule the FAA previously expected"
author: "Nate Ledger"
published: 2026-11-06T19:12:28Z
modified: 2026-11-07T08:52:57Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/the-faa-is-retiring-its-floppy-disks-and-has-set-itself-a-20-ecb3fd
language: en
tags: ["faa", "infrastructure", "technology", "drones", "regulation", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# The FAA Is Retiring Its Floppy Disks, and Has Set Itself a 2028 Deadline

*A Leidos-built display system will replace four legacy platforms at 435 sites, six years ahead of the schedule the FAA previously expected*

By Nate Ledger · November 6, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/the-faa-is-retiring-its-floppy-disks-and-has-set-itself-a-20-ecb3fd

## In brief

- The FAA has begun installing E-IDS, a display system meant to replace floppy-disk-era tools for air traffic controllers
- E-IDS replaces four legacy systems, including the MS-DOS-based IDS-4, and targets 435 facilities by the end of 2028
- Leidos won the development contract in August 2020, reportedly worth about $292 million
- GAO says the finish date moved from September 2034 to September 2028, and found no master schedule or full cost estimate
- First sites are Atlantic City, Nashville and Greater Rochester airports, plus data hubs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City

“Good news America: floppy disks are out, 21st century tech is in,” US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said this week. He also posted a video about it, in which a newscaster explains that “the FAA systems are essentially running on Windows 95.” That is mostly a figure of speech. One of the systems in question actually runs on MS-DOS, so Windows 95 would be an upgrade.

Here is the actual news. The Federal Aviation Administration has begun installing something called the Enterprise Information Display System, or E-IDS, and wants it running at 435 facilities by the end of 2028, as [Jon Brodkin reported for Ars Technica](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/11/faa-to-finally-ditch-floppy-disks-in-what-it-calls-historic-tech-upgrade/). E-IDS replaces four older systems that go by a small pile of acronyms: the Information Display System 4 (IDS-4), the Controller Equipment Information Display System (ACE-IDS), the NAS Information Display System (NIDS) and the En Route Information Display System (ERIDS). Four systems become one screen.

It helps to be clear about what these systems do, because “air traffic control runs on floppy disks” sounds a lot scarier than the reality. According to a September 2026 report from the Government Accountability Office, the display systems sit in Air Route Traffic Control Centers, Terminal Radar Approach Control facilities and control towers, and they show text and graphics “such as flight approach charts, combined with Notice to Airmen and weather information. This information is needed to support controller-to-pilot flight operations.” As [Annemarije de Boer wrote at Gadget Review](https://gadgetreview.com/the-faa-still-uses-floppy-disks-that-changes-by-2028), the FAA’s own announcement presents the disks as part of the information-sharing setup, not as anything that directly controls aircraft. Nobody is steering a 737 with a 3.5-inch diskette. The disks are how a controller looks up the weather, the NOTAMs, pilot reports, equipment outages and restricted-airspace schedules. Today those come from separate sources that people update by hand.

![Three floppy disks displaying rain, a winding airport runway approach, and partly sunny weather sit in a coral tray beside an airport control tower.](https://rews.cc/img/d4b6acabefdb000c1abaae059700002e9a195b65.webp)

Which is still not ideal! The GAO put it this way: “Legacy display systems rely on obsolete technology (e.g., floppy disks) and interfaces from the 1980s, inefficient data organization, and manual update methods. The systems are cumbersome for controllers to search, retrieve, and display information. Multiple diverse display systems create inefficient activities needed to sustain these systems.” An April 2026 Department of Transportation report said that controllers “have used a system that is driven by floppy disks and an antiquated operation system for critical information such as weather, NOTAMs and airport status.” Under E-IDS, the report said, “instead of searching for info, they \[will\] have immediate access to everything they need to make split-second decisions.”

The MS-DOS system is IDS-4. According to a 2018 press release from Systems Atlanta, a vendor that held an FAA contract to support it, IDS-4 “has been in constant use since the early 1990s as a vital informational resource/tool for air traffic controllers.” PCMag has noted that it seems to run on desktop PCs fitted with 3.5-inch floppy drives. Reuters has reported that floppy disks fell out of general use more than 25 years ago and have not been mass-produced since 2011. So at some point the job of keeping air traffic information flowing turned into the job of finding floppy disks.

I think this is the interesting part, and it isn’t really about technology. Imagine you run a system that works. It is ugly and slow and needs a specialist vendor to keep it alive, but it has worked every day for 30 years. Replacing it means spending a lot of money up front, retraining people, and accepting a real chance that the new thing breaks in a way the old thing never did, in a setting where things breaking is very bad. Keeping it means paying a modest maintenance bill every year and putting up with some annoyance that mostly lands on controllers. Each year, keeping it is the cheaper choice. You can make the cheaper choice for three decades in a row and end up with a building full of floppy drives. That happens because every individual decision was sensible, not because anyone was stupid.

![A person crouches beside a desk with a large retro computer, placing a gold coin onto a tall stack against a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/c6759bef6597b21bc70b16debcab44c5edba7432.webp)

Sure.

The replacement has been a long time coming too. The FAA hired Leidos to design and develop E-IDS in August 2020, in a contract [worth about $292 million, according to Gizmodo](https://gizmodo.com/faa-plans-to-retire-floppy-disks-by-2028-2000835905). At the time Leidos described it as part of NextGen, the FAA’s modernization program, which covers upgrades going back to 2008. Officials in both the Biden and Trump administrations moved the plan along. Duffy, following the usual practice for Trump appointees, gave the credit to one of them: “The greatest nation in the world deserves a state-of-the-art air traffic control system, and under President Trump, we’re delivering just that.” Duffy has also said modernization “is coming at lightning speed.” Speed is relative. The contract is six years old.

## The schedule

To be fair to the lightning, the deadline has moved a lot. The GAO reported that the FAA had expected to finish installing E-IDS in September 2034, and that the current modernization plan pulls that in to September 2028. That is six years sooner. The extra speed is supposed to come from money: Trump’s tax and spending bill set aside $12.5 billion for air traffic control upgrades. But the same GAO report, as Gizmodo summarized it, found that the wider modernization effort had no comprehensive lifecycle cost estimate and no integrated master schedule, and counted more than 11,000 project schedules that were not coordinated with each other. The GAO warned that without those basics, “the agency could end up causing air traffic disruptions or prolonging reliance on severely outdated systems.” Cutting six years off a deadline is easier when no master schedule exists to say whether you can.

![A navy road with white markings twists into a tangled knot against a yellow background before straightening toward a white airplane at the upper right.](https://rews.cc/img/3696f2f11ee1c28b9d494b92a0ba64d7321cf3b4.webp)

The rollout starts at five sites: Atlantic City International Airport, Nashville International Airport, Greater Rochester International Airport, and data-processing hubs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City. The other 430 come after that. The 2028 date is a deadline for a staged rollout, not for one big switchover. How well it goes will depend a lot on whether the first installations are clean enough to copy at hundreds of facilities of very different sizes. [Mezha reported](https://mezha.ua/en/news/faa-drops-floppy-discs-316932/) that the FAA has not said how much the deployment will cost. The Leidos contract may not cover all of it. FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said that “E-IDS gives air traffic controllers the information they need to make timely decisions and keep the flying public safe,” and described the agency as “replacing technology that once relied on floppy disks with a modern system.” The agency also expects E-IDS to cut down on expensive repairs and workarounds for aging equipment.

E-IDS is one piece of a larger overhaul that also covers telecommunications, radar, radio and surveillance. Separately, the FAA is replacing paper flight strips with digital tracking at major airports. So far 27 of 49 have switched, and that program is also aiming for 2028. A lot of very old technology is scheduled to be gone in 2028.

Anyway, the floppy disk is a great prop for a press video, because everyone over 40 understands it right away. The harder thing to film is the 11,000 schedules.

## Sources

- [FAA to finally ditch floppy disks in what it calls "historic" tech upgrade](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/11/faa-to-finally-ditch-floppy-disks-in-what-it-calls-historic-tech-upgrade/) — Ars Technica
- [The FAA Still Uses Floppy Disks. That Changes by 2028. - Gadget Review](https://gadgetreview.com/the-faa-still-uses-floppy-disks-that-changes-by-2028) — gadgetreview.com