FAA floppy disks finally retire, but not before 2028

Next time you’re stuck on the tarmac wondering why your flight is delayed, picture this: somewhere in a control tower, a controller is squinting at a DOS screen fed by a 3.5-inch floppy. Not in 1994. Right now.

The FAA floppy disks era is finally ending, or so the agency announced this week with the kind of chest-thumping usually reserved for moon landings. US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called it a “historic” upgrade. Historic, sure. Also about twenty years late, but who’s counting.

FAA floppy disks: what’s actually being replaced

The system in question is called IDS-4, the Information Display System 4. It runs on MS-DOS, it’s been in service since the early 1990s, and it lives on desktop PCs with floppy drives. Its job is far from trivial: it’s where controllers look up weather, pilot reports (PIREPs), NOTAMs about closed runways or hazards, and airport status. Basically the stuff you really want to be current when you’re talking a 737 down through a storm.

Updates to that data are, in part, done manually. With disks. A September 2026 report from the Government Accountability Office didn’t mince words: the legacy display systems “rely on obsolete technology (e.g., floppy disks) and interfaces from the 1980s, inefficient data organization, and manual update methods.” And because there isn’t one system but four (IDS-4, ACE-IDS, NIDS and ERIDS, if you’re collecting acronyms), controllers often have to hop between screens to piece together a single picture.

The replacement is E-IDS, the Enterprise Information Display System, a single platform that pulls all of that into one view. It’s being built by Leidos, which won the contract back in August 2020. Yes, 2020. The first sites to get it are Atlantic City, Nashville, Rochester and the data hubs in Atlanta and Salt Lake City, and the FAA plans to have all 435 facilities converted by the end of 2028, as Ars Technica reported.

So the “floppy disks are out” announcement really means “floppy disks will be out in two years, if nothing slips.” Which, in federal IT, is a big if.

Why it took so long

Here’s the uncomfortable truth that nobody in the press conference wanted to say out loud: the floppies kept working. That’s the whole problem. An MS-DOS box with no network stack is immune to ransomware, doesn’t need a Windows Update reboot at 3 am, and has a failure mode everyone understands. When the alternative is a multi-year procurement with a vendor, a safety certification process, and a Congress that changes its mind every two years, “don’t touch it” wins by default.

This upgrade was shepherded through both the Biden and Trump administrations, whatever the current credit-taking suggests, and it’s a tiny slice of NextGen, a modernization program that started in 2008. Eighteen years. Some of the controllers who’ll use E-IDS were in kindergarten when it kicked off.

Duffy also shared a clip of a newscaster saying “the FAA systems are essentially running on Windows 95,” which is a bit unfair to Windows 95. IDS-4 would have considered Windows 95 a luxury.

The retro-computing lesson

I’ll admit I have a soft spot for this stuff. I once wrote about someone squeezing Windows 11 onto a CD-ROM, so I’m the last person to mock old media. But there’s a difference between a hobby and a safety-critical system where the backup plan is “find a working floppy drive on eBay.”

The real takeaway isn’t “lol floppies.” It’s that legacy systems don’t fail loudly; they fail by slowly making every change around them impossible. If your company still has that one Windows XP box in a corner because “it runs the thing,” you’re running your own little FAA. The upgrade will always look expensive until the day the old system stops booting and you discover nobody alive knows how it worked.

Until 2028, then, the skies over America will remain partly guided by media that can’t hold a single smartphone photo. Fly safe.