“Good news for America: floppy disks are out, 21st century technology is here,” said US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Duffy released a video yesterday about the upgrade in which a presenter describing the FAA’s outdated technology says, “FAA systems run primarily on Windows 95.”
Like other Trump appointees, Duffy was quick to give the president credit, although the plan was driven by officials from both the Biden and Trump administrations. “The greatest nation on earth deserves a state-of-the-art air traffic control system, and under President Trump’s leadership, that’s exactly what we’re delivering,” Duffy said.
In August 2020, the FAA awarded a contract to Leidos to design and develop the E-IDS. Leidos said in a press release at the time that the E-IDS was part of the FAA’s Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) modernization project, which includes numerous upgrades dating back to 2008.
The FAA said E-IDS would replace Information Display System 4 (IDS-4), Controller Equipment Information Display System (ACE-IDS), NAS Information Display System (NIDS), and En Route Information Display System (ERIDS).
IDS-4, one of the systems being replaced, runs MS-DOS and “has been in constant use since the early 1990s as a vital information resource/tool for air traffic controllers,” according to a 2018 press release issued by Systems Atlanta, a vendor that had a contract with the FAA to support the system. As PCMag notes, IDS-4 appears to work on desktop computers with 3.5-inch floppy drives.
Image from the Ministry of Transportation’s report on the E-IDS upgrade.
Image from the Ministry of Transportation’s report on the E-IDS upgrade.
Credit: US Department of Transportation
Obsolete technology “cumbersome for controllers”
An April 2026 report from the Department of Transportation stated: “Controllers used a floppy disk-driven system and an outdated operating system for critical information such as weather, NOTAMs and airport status. » With E-IDS, these controllers will have “a single platform that brings this data together in a single view. Instead of searching for information, they (will) have immediate access to everything they need to make split-second decisions,” the report says.
The outdated systems were criticized in a September 2026 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). “Legacy display systems rely on outdated technologies (e.g., floppy disks) and 1980s interfaces, inefficient data organization, and manual updating methods,” the report states. “The systems are cumbersome for controllers who must search, retrieve, and display information. Multiple, diverse display systems create inefficient activities necessary for these systems to operate.”
The GAO report states that these information display systems are used in air traffic control centers, terminal radar approach control facilities, and control towers. The systems display textual and graphical information, “such as flight approach charts, combined with notices to aviators and weather information. This information is necessary to support flight operations from controller to pilot,” GAO said.
This article was updated with additional information and a floppy chart on November 6, 2026 at 3:05 p.m.
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