David, an airplane owner in Iowa, writes: Given the recent reported radio outage at Newark, I’m sure we could all use a refresher and perspective on lost comms. It’s one thing to have an on-board failure, but seems much different if ATC goes down, especially in busy airspace. It would be great to hear and learn about scenarios that appear more likely than we thought.
That’s a great idea! This is definitely worth talking about, for two reasons.
The first is that it wasn’t just Newark — which as of this writing has suffered four outages, one of which was radio and radar, leaving the tower both deaf and blind — but Forbes also reports that Atlanta, Denver, and Houston ATCs have had recent technical glitches that left them unable to communicate with pilots.
Now, in fairness, the longest of these outages was about 90 seconds. Even at airliner speeds and in high traffic densities, a minute and a half isn’t that long. Some of the crews on the flight decks probably didn’t even realize it had happened. (In the tower, on the other hand, I’m sure it felt like an eternity.)
But the length of time isn’t the point. The point is that this isn’t supposed to happen at all. There are multiple redundancies in power, radios, antennas, and frequencies.
So that begs the question: What if ATC went truly and fully dark for an extended period of time?
Some readers will argue that it’s impossible, but we’ve already seen that the “impossible” is possible, so I think it’s a fair question to ponder — especially given the aging infrastructure of ATC, and the fact the government is now in a hair-on-fire rush to upgrade it.
And I’ve observed over my lifetime that when things are getting “fixed” is when they tend to break completely.
On top of that, it’s the core DNA of pilot training to ponder and prepare for even the least likely of scenarios so that we will be ready for anything the sky can throw at us.
The second reason this is a good idea to talk about is that if you don’t remember what you were taught about ATC blackouts during your flight training, it’s because you never were taught anything about ATC blackouts during your flight training.
Nearly all our training materials on lost comms presume that it’s the pilot in the air that is the loser of comms, not ATC on the ground. There is precious little written about what we should do if the problem is on the other end. In fact, the regulations, the Aeronautical Information Manual (AIM), the Airman Certification Standards (ACS), and the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge (PHAK) are all mute on the subject, as far as I can tell, which is ironic, given our subject.
The only official mention of ATC-based comm failures that I could locate is in one small section of a radio education piece in the FAASTeam Library called Radio Communications and Phraseology Techniques. That, in turn, is adapted from FAA Pamphlet P-8740-47, which doesn’t seem to be online anywhere, suggesting that it’s an older piece.
Anyway, this resource tells us, “Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC) normally have at least one back-up radio receiver and transmitter system for each frequency, which can usually be placed into service quickly with little or no disruption of ATC service. Occasionally, technical problems may cause a delay, but switchover seldom takes more than 60 seconds.”
But it then goes on to say, “When it appears that the outage will not be quickly remedied, the ARTCC will usually request a near-by aircraft, if there is one, to switch to the affected frequency to broadcast communications instructions.”
Of course, that’s talking about centers, not towers. It also assumes a one-frequency failure, not a total system blackout.
So where does that leave us?
Part of the problem we face is that there’s nearly an infinite number of ways that this bad day could play out. Or quoting the AIM, in 6-4-1, “it is virtually impossible to provide regulations and procedures applicable to all possible situations associated with two-way radio communications failure.”
Are we talking about Newark, New Jersey? Or New Castle, Delaware? Is it just the airport or a whole region that’s gone down? Is it VMC or IMC? How busy is the sky? Is it day or night? What kind of aircraft are you in?
That said, the AIM, in the same section, does give us the only official guidance we’re going to get for dealing with an ATC blackout: “During two-way radio communications failure, when confronted by a situation not covered in the regulations, pilots are expected to exercise good judgment in whatever action they elect to take.”
So that, dear readers, is what we are left with. Our good judgment.
Which is a little scary. Not in that we, or other pilots, have bad judgment, but in that our collective good judgment will not be the same.
That’s the nice thing about procedures. When everyone follows them, you know what the other pilot will be doing and what he or she will do next.
How Would You Recognize an ATC Failure?
Regardless, I guess the first thing to talk about is how would you even know that ATC had a failure?
I presume that most of us would assume — as we’ve been trained to assume — that if we lost comms, the problem must lay with us. We’d be troubleshooting our radios by confirming proper frequencies, checking the volume controls on the radio, intercom, and headset, unplugging and replugging our headsets or trying alternate jacks, confirming the circuit breakers haven’t popped, all while changing the squawk code to 7600 and cursing out our this-time innocent mechanic.
The only way you’d know it wasn’t you is that, at some point, you’d hear other airplanes also trying to contact ATC. And if you and the other guy can talk to each other, well now you know the problem is on the ground.
Then what? Well, it depends on the circumstances.
Let’s review the most common ones.
Of course, as we are talking about an ATC failure scenario, for GA, we are realistically only talking about Center or controlled-airport blackouts. The only “ATC” radio failure we can have in the non-towered ecosystem is the AWOS and the windsock has our back in that situation.
When it comes to Center, if you are VFR and lose Flight Following, it really doesn’t matter. They could have kicked you off at a moment’s notice, workload dependent, anyway. If you are IFR, there are detailed regs in §91.185 for what to do in a two-way comms failure that could still be deployed.
Although one reminder on those rules: While any instrument student can parrot the hierarchy of assigned/vectored/expected/filed actions, many miss one key fact. If you are on an IFR flight plan, but in VMC — or if you were in IMC and then encounter VMC after you lose comms — the regs require you to abandon your instrument flight plan, squawk 1200, climb or descend to a VFR altitude, and then proceed with the VFR playbook. This makes sense in every scenario but ours.
Lost comm procedures, as designed, assume you are the only piece on the chessboard without a radio. The idea is that you do things slowly, predictably, and steadily, and ATC gets all the other folks out of your way.
But in a lost ATC comms scenario, the established battle plan becomes a bit of a dangerous play, as every chess piece on the board is now moving and no one has the big picture.
Still, you only need to get 500 feet up or down to be in a VFR altitude band and then it’s back to how you learned to fly before you got your instrument rating.
Towered Airports
So I think it’s the towered-airport blackout that deserves the most fear and attention, especially if it’s a larger airport.
After all, if it’s a small airport and you are already in the airspace, just enter the pattern (if you are in their airspace, you already know the active runway), fly it properly, turn on all your exterior lights, keep a sharp lookout for other traffic, but as your radios work — and so, too, do all the other airplanes’ — make traffic pattern calls as you would if you were at an non-towered airport, then follow the right-of-way rules and watch for light signals, hoping for a steady green, and get ready to rock your wings to acknowledge the signal.
Flying a “radio-less” pattern at a blacked-out towered airport is actually only a mild extension of typical non-towered airport ops. After all, we are used to a few folks with no radios, a few who have them but don’t use them, and the occasional pilot who is diligently using the wrong frequency. And it all works out.
And if you don’t get a light signal of any kind from the blacked-out tower? Exercise good judgment.
What about your transponder in this scenario? I’d leave it wherever it was set. After all, YOU don’t have the radio failure, they do. Their radar may or may not work, but if it’s up and working, it would be no help to them whatsoever if everyone in their airspace suddenly started squawking 7600.
Needless to say, if you have not yet entered the airspace when they blackout, you should go somewhere else.
At Big Airports
But at bigger airports it’s not so simple.
Consider, if you were crazy enough to be landing at one of the big boys with recent problems, just flying a pattern isn’t as simple as it sounds. You can hardly fly a pattern at Atlanta with its five parallel runways, Denver with its four parallel runways, or Houston with its three. You could at Newark, with only two parallel runways, by logically plugging in a left- and right-hand pattern, but when was the last time the airline crew you’re sharing the airspace with flew a traffic pattern? And how far out would they need to be if they did?
One good option is to get the Hell out of Dodge, and, in a wide-spread ATC outage, go to a non-towered airport. That’s actually the advice in the Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge.
In 14-24, it states, “if radio communication is lost, it may be a prudent decision to land at a non-towered airport with lower traffic volume, if practical,” pointing out that — technically and legally — at non-towered airports, “no radio communication is necessary.”
Of course, once again, they are talking about you losing your radios, not the ATC system. Still, it’s even better for you at an uncontrolled airport in our scenario, as all the players still have their comms. In fact, it would be a normal day at a non-towered airport, even though the towered airport next door is having a really bad day.
The only issue is how do you safely and blindly exit the lost-comm airspace to get to the non-towered safe haven? That would depend on where you are.
I guess it comes down to that good judgment thing. If it were me, and I was deep in a Bravo in a little airplane, I think I would go low — neighbors and noise abatement be damned — and fly whatever heading got me out of the airspace the quickest.
Of course, there are a few other options to consider in the modern world.
Most of us have cell phones. You could try calling the tower. Naturally, everyone else will be doing that too, but eventually someone in the tower will have a light bulb moment and might use cell service to relay instructions to one airplane to transmit to all the others.
Given a longer outage, ATC might run down to the ramp and take over an airplane to use as an emergency broadcast station, but we can’t count on that.
Now, the Newark outage was a bizarre rolling up-down-up failure across its various frequencies. But there’s a good lesson there.
If you can’t reach ATC on one frequency, try another. Larger airports have a lot of different points of contact: Several approach frequencies, tower, ground, ramp control, pre-taxi, clearance delivery, departure, perhaps even UNICOM. Some towered airports have both primary and secondary frequencies for many of these functions. At smaller controlled airports, the tower frequency also doubles as a CTAF, so if it’s charted as such, that’s where you’re going to find the other ATC-marooned airplanes.
What about Flight Service? Should you call them?
Perhaps, although how much help they could be in this case is an open question. After all, they are more the weather information adjunct of ATC. Besides which, they are on the chopping block, and aren’t likely to be around much longer, so by the time you need to call them, no one may be home to answer.
In one final thought for the day, we have the guidance — in the regs for lost comms on instrument plans in VMC — to land as soon as “practicable,” which is barely a real word, at least not one a dictionary will help you understand.
Thankfully, the AIM has some help for us here, by being very clear that landing “as soon as practicable” does not mean landing “as soon as practical.”
So you still get to exercise your good judgment on where and when you will land, if and when ATC goes dark.
I hope many of you will share your thoughts and good judgment in the comments below.
