How and where would planes land safely If air traffic control went down
In: Technology
This has happened on small scales in the event of things like tower evacuations, medical emergencies in the tower, and controllers locking themselves out of the cab. There’s audio of a plane trying to land in DC and not getting any response (the controller fell asleep IIRC).
Standard procedure is to switch to CTAF, or Common Traffic Advisory Frequency where each pilot announces their position and intentions and other pilots listen and plan accordingly.
If you’re talking about a full scale nationwide outage of all ATC radio communications, this would be extremely difficult at major airports, but nothing really technically impossible. Towers do have light guns they can use, but nobody ever uses those and they’ve always got two inches of dust on top of them. And they’re not practical for larger fields.
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