Hundreds of U.S. air traffic facilities each keep their own copy of the weather, the outages and the pilot reports. Pick one, report a problem, and watch how the news reaches everyone else.
Not from public records. I searched USAspending.gov for FAA contract records since 2007 that mention eBay and found none. Small card purchases are not itemized there. What the record does show: the FAA buying devices that stand in for a floppy drive.
| Date | What the FAA bought | Amount | Order |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aug. 6, 2015 | “SD floppy disk emulator” | $36,235.72 | DTFAAC15P05706 |
| July 15, 2020 | “Floppy drive emulator with software, cables, and mounting bracket for ATCBI-6” (a radar beacon system) | $29,642.00 | 6973GH20P03398 |
Concept demo. It is not connected to any aviation system and is not the FAA’s software. The facilities on the map are real: FAA towers, contract towers, approach controls and en route centers from the FAA’s facility list for the cycle effective Oct. 29, 2026 (stand-alone approach controls and centers are placed at their city; seven facilities in U.S. territories fall outside the map). The radar picture is NOAA’s live national composite, fetched when the page loads; “weather overhead” means radar returns within a few miles of a facility at that moment and is not a forecast. The flights in “Now make the call” are invented, and so are the scoring weights. Everything else is illustrative: the reports are made up, the lines show an assumed who-calls-whom network (each tower to its nearest approach control or center, centers to each other), each phone call is assumed to take 95 seconds, and the shared board’s one second and its backup path are design goals, not measurements. The FAA has not published which 435 sites get its new display. Sources for the facts above: U.S. DOT press release and Reuters reporting (Nov. 5, 2026), AOPA’s breakdown of H.R. 1 (July 2025), GAO reports GAO-24-107001 (Sept. 2024) and GAO-26-107992 (Sept. 2026), and Holland & Knight’s April 2026 program summary.