Floppy disks. The 1980s want them back but the United States’ aviation authority isn’t ready to let go yet. Instead, the FAA said this week it will phase out usage by 2028.‘Wait’. ‘Hold on’, you say. Is the FAA still using a decades-old technology to track the roughly 5,200 planes flying over US domestic airspace at any given minute? In 2026?Yes. And no. Look closely and the picture is less alarming and more interesting. The floppy disks themselves don’t track air traffic. Instead, they are part of four 80s-era computer systems that store ‘vital weather and other critical information’.A US Department of Transportation changesheet said: “Controllers use a system – Information Display System 4 – driven by floppy disks and an antiquated operation system for critical information such as weather, NOTAMs, and airport status.” By 2028 all four will be folded into modern information display equipment; “Floppy disks from the 1980s: OUT,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declared on X.Floppy disks from the 1980s: OUT 勞 21st century tech: IN The new Enterprise Information Display System, or E-IDS, is a streamlined way for air traffic controllers to get REAL-TIME weather, equipment, and traffic info, all in ONE place and on ONE display!5 sites now. More than 400 @FAANews facilities by 2028. Safer skies for you.— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) November 5, 2026 US Department of Transportation to phase out floppy disk use by FAAAgain, yes. And no.Floppy disks stopped being widely used worldwide nearly three decades ago.By 2011 major manufacturers, including Sony and Mitsubishi, had stopped. Amkette, an Indian company, carried the torch for two more years before it too gave up.What killed the disk was the rapid evolution of data storage devices.Story continues below this adFrom 1971 to 1988 the floppy disks were the pinnacle of that technology, rising to offer 1.44 MB in storage. If you’ve stopped reading for a second, I don’t blame you.That is an absurdly small amount of data storage capacity… it really is. It’s smaller than that photograph you took this morning on your phone.But stay with me because that ’71 to ’88 jump underlines just how data storage tech exploded. The first 8-inch disk from 1971 could store 80 kilobytes. By 1977 that had jumped to 1.2 MB – 15 times more storage capacity in just six years.Then in 1988 came the 1.44 MB floppy disk. And suddenly they were everywhere… the gold standard in data portability. But by the mid-90s CD-ROM drives had become a default in PCs; CDs, around since 1982, had been improved to store 650 MB each.Story continues below this adThat was about 450 disks – roughly the length of two cricket stumps. Then came DVDs, launching first in Japan at 4.7 GB per disc – around 3,260 floppies.If there are dates that signalled the floppy disk’s fate, it’s 1998.The iMac G3 by Apple – a company not afraid to pull the tech trigger – shipped with a CD-ROM drive and USB ports but no floppy drive.And 1999, the pen drive.Something we all remember and something we use even today. The first stored 8 MB and by 2013 it was carrying 1 TB (a terabyte is a million megabytes), then 2 TB, and then 4 TB.Story continues below this adToday external hard drives are capable of carrying over 40 TB of data.Then there’s the size aspect, which moved inversely to storage capacity.Today a 1 TB microSD card is roughly 15×11×1 mm and weighs about 0.3 grams. Put that beside a floppy – which measures 90×94×3.3 mm and you’ll see the card is about 170 times smaller by volume but holds roughly 694,000 times more.Stack that many floppies and you’d have a tower 2.3 km high weighing around 14 tonnes – or roughly the weight of a standard public bus in most Indian cities.Story continues below this adSo why did the FAA continue to use a significantly less capable data storage technology for decades? The answer – it isn’t nostalgia, it’s risk mitigation.A system that has run reasonably well for decades – in multiple use-case scenarios – is always going to be favoured over a newer set-up that has to be tested and certified in as many situations. And that is problematic in an industry where mistakes cost lives.And perhaps that makes it less strange then that governments worldwide moved slowly to end floppy disk use. Japan only did it in 2024 and the US Air Force stopped using 8-inch diskettes as part of systems controlling nuclear missile silos only in 2019.In fact, till 2020 some of the software controlling a Boeing 747-400 also had to be updated and maintained by technicians carrying a bunch of floppy disks.Chandrashekar is a senior editor with over 17 years of experience in reporting, writing, editing, an... Read MoreStay updated with the latest - Click here to follow us on InstagramTags:computerFAA