By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON, Nov 5 (Reuters) – The US Federal Aviation Administration said on Thursday it will replace by the end of 2028 the outdated floppy disks used for weather and other critical information at more than 400 air traffic control facilities across the country.
The Enterprise Information Display System will replace four systems dating back to the 1980s and will put important operational information in one place so controllers can quickly see air traffic updates.
Floppy disks largely stopped being used more than 25 years ago and have not been produced in large numbers since 2011. Congress last year approved $12.5 billion to fix the aging US air traffic control system and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wants another $30 billion for additional upgrades as the FAA deals with numerous technology issues.
“We’re moving away from outdated, manual processes and replacing technology that once relied on floppy disks with a modern system that allows controllers to instantly share critical flight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,” FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said in a statement.
In a previously unreported October 23 FAA memo to airports seen by Reuters, the agency said “there have been a number of recent air traffic control outages due to fiber optic cable cuts, which can lead to delays, diversions and cancellations” and urged coordination with the FAA on projects.
The FAA cited an October 13 event where a fiber optic cable connecting Houston George Bush Intercontinental Airport to the FAA’s network was cut outside an airport gate, leading to the loss of data services between FAA facilities and requiring a ground stop.
In September, thousands of flights across the densely populated Northeast were delayed or canceled due to the dual failures of a circuit at a Philadelphia air traffic facility and the accidental severing of a fiber-optic cable in New Jersey by a construction crew.
DECADES-OLD COMPUTERS AND SPARE PARTS FROM EBAY
The FAA relies on telecoms systems it is racing to replace as well as decades-old Compaq computers and replacement parts bought on eBay. The US has the world’s most complex airspace and faces a shortage of several thousand air traffic controllers.
The country’s air traffic facilities cannot talk to one another and operate on individual analog computers. “Every facility is a silo,” Bedford told Reuters in a recent interview.
The FAA has also been working for years to end a long-ridiculed, decades-old practice of air traffic controllers using paper flight strips to keep track of aircraft. But adopting the change, which started in 2022, at 49 major airports will take until at least 2028. A total of 27 major airports have already done away with the paper strips.
(Reporting by David ShepardsonEditing by Tomasz Janowski, Kirsten Donovan)
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