Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS)

TFMS (previously ETMS) is a data exchange system for supporting the management and monitoring of national air traffic flow. TFMS processes all available data sources such as flight plan messages, flight plan amendment messages, and departure and arrival messages. The FAA’s NAS Data Warehouse assembles TFMS flight messages into one record per flight. TFMS is restricted to the subset of flights that fly under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) and are captured by the FAA’s enroute computers. Most VFR and some non-enroute IFR traffic is excluded.

For more information on accessing TFMS traffic counts, see the Traffic Flow Management System Counts (TFMSC) page on the FAA Web site.