How and where would planes land safely If air traffic control went down
In: Technology
You don’t need ATC to land. ATC is just a traffic coordinator.
Many small private airports don’t even have ATC, called uncontrolled airports. Every single pilot has been to these and done extensive training on landing without formal ATC. Plenty of smaller private airports too, even ones with a lot of traffic often are only controlled certain hours, but often have no ATC late night.
Every pilot is trained in what to do for ATC being down, it’s not a big issues as you might think. Each airport will have a frequency for landing traffic, you flip it on and the airplanes say their intention, where they are, and coordinate among themselves how to land. It’s not at all a problem, you’ve done this and so has everyone else
For commercial aircraft, with passengers, you’d want to avoid this, unless you need to get on the ground, if you can just go to another close airport with ATC working. But if no ATC and planes need to land, you can do it fine, you’ve been trained for it, and everyone knows what to do.
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