The United States Federal Aviation Administration has announced that it will stop using floppy disks in its air traffic control facilities, as part of an upgrade it describes as a historic modernisation.
The replacement, the Enterprise Information Display System, or E-IDS, will be installed at 435 facilities, taking over from several information display systems that date to the 1980s. The agency said the new system would be deployed to operational control positions at more than 400 facilities across all air traffic control domains.
The FAA said it is "continuing its historic modernization of America's air traffic control system by replacing outdated floppy disks that contain vital weather and other critical information with a streamlined, 21st-century system".
The systems being retired are IDS-4, ACE-IDS, NIDS and ERIDS. IDS-4 runs on MS-DOS and, according to a 2018 release from a vendor that held an FAA support contract for it, has been in constant use since the early 1990s. As PCMag has noted, it appears to run on desktop computers with three-and-a-half-inch floppy drives.
The upgrade is aimed at two of the agency's standing safety concerns: getting weather alerts from pilot reports to other pilots, and distributing Notices to Airmen, which carry information on hazards and abnormal statuses.
"E-IDS gives air traffic controllers the information they need to make timely decisions and keep the flying public safe," the FAA Administrator, Bryan Bedford, said. He added that the agency was "moving away from outdated, manual processes and replacing technology that once relied on floppy disks with a modern system that allows controllers to instantly share critical flight alerts, restricted airspace schedules and pilot reports across the National Airspace System".
The criticism has been on the record for some time. A Department of Transportation report in April said controllers had "used a system that is driven by floppy disks and an antiquated operation system for critical information such as weather, NOTAMs and airport status". A Government Accountability Office report in September found that the legacy displays "rely on obsolete technology (e.g., floppy disks) and interfaces from the 1980s, inefficient data organization, and manual update methods", and that they were cumbersome for controllers to search.
The first installations will go to 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 complete all 435 sites by the end of 2028.
The project has a longer history than the announcement suggests. The contract to design and develop E-IDS was awarded to Leidos in August 2020, and the work forms part of NextGen, the agency's modernisation programme, which dates to 2008. The change has been in the works for over six years; the then acting administrator, Chris Rocheleau, told the House Appropriations Committee last year: "No more floppy disks or paper strips."
This newspaper has no quarrel with the engineering, but the chronology deserves attention, because the FAA has quietly settled a question of classification.
A technology's era is conventionally taken from when it was invented. The agency has proposed a better rule, in which the era is taken from the replacement schedule. On that basis the floppy disk will have served American air traffic control from the early 1990s to the end of 2028: around eight years of the twentieth century, and twenty-eight of the twenty-first.
The floppy disk is therefore, by a margin of more than three to one, a twenty-first-century technology. It is being replaced by another twenty-first-century technology, which makes this a lateral move.
The same arithmetic applies to the replacement. E-IDS was commissioned in 2020 and completes in 2028, so by the time the 435th site is switched on, the modern system will have been eight years in delivery, which is exactly as long as the floppy disk spent in the twentieth century.
Our analysts note that the first five sites represent about one per cent of the programme, leaving 99 per cent of the twenty-first century still scheduled.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has recommended the method for general adoption. Dating a technology by when it stops being used, rather than by when it started, resolves a great many disputes about progress, and has the further advantage that nothing is ever obsolete until the paperwork clears.