The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is investigating a 90-second outage at Denver International Airport earlier this week that left some 20 pilots unable to communicate with air traffic control.
So, have a handheld radio. Pilots cary them, why don’t controllers?
Handheld radios have proven their worth in a pinch. At my home airport, the tower once caught fire, and during the chaos, a quick-thinking controller climbed onto a nearby camper and managed to direct traffic successfully.
Handheld radios MAY help at smaller towers but at an ARTCC it would be a different story. The vast majority of the Remote Controlled Air to Ground Radio sites are hundreds of miles from the ARTCC building housing the controllers.
All towers and TRACONS in which I worked did have some form of battery backup radio.
Have the tower squawk 7600 and then proceed as filed.
Am I the only one who noticed the lenticular clouds above the mountains in the photo? Fun flying if you know what you’re doing and flying a glider!
Back in the early 90s I flew a glider up to FL280 above the Rockies and, yes, I had an ATC clearance, a military mask, and a pressure/demand regulator. It was cold up there…
Interestingly enough both locations are major United Airlines Hubs. Coincidence ?
This communications outage was at Denver Center, which most of us know is not Denver Tower or Approach control, and is not located at Denver Intl Airport. I would expect more accuracy from Amelia and Avweb on this.
Interesting responses from the people in charge. "While some reports claimed the outage lasted up to six minutes, McIntosh dismissed those accounts as “overexaggerated.” Why not just say that the information is incorrect? His response leads one to believe that the outage did indeed last longer than 90 seconds, just not a full 6 minutes. “I believe the system is safe” says Sean Duffy in a statement to Congress. Yeah, well some people believe the world is flat, but that don’t make it true. Sounds like a couple of politicians trying to fast-talk their way around a serious problem.
“I believe the system is safe. There are multiple redundancies throughout the system that keep people safe. Even the frustrations in Newark when we’ve slowed traffic down, the key is not efficiency, the key is safety.”. Can someone translate this last sentence?
Exactly! That is why there are Lost Comm procedures. Duh.
I also understand they switched to alternate frequencies after communicating to aircraft on 121.5.
Plus, a center’s airspace is not as congested as a tower’s.
There are also back-up generators at all facilities in the event of power failures.
And in that event, say a power failure and the radar goes out, all controllers are trained in manual control.
All approach and center controllers still maintain FAA Form 7230-8, which is the small and thin strip of paper to track all traffic.
Despite certain issues which are being addressed, I still have high confidence in the ATC system.
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