How and where would planes land safely If air traffic control went down
In: Technology
Safely? Not happening. It would be absolute chaos.
They’d just go to another airport instead of trying to land at the one without ATC, which is a very very unlikely scenario.
First “Air traffic control” won’t just “go down”.
Air traffic control is a massively redundant system that isn’t just at one location. Any sort of disaster that took it all out would almost certainly take out all the planes too, if not destroy the airports themselves.
A single airport’s control tower might be affected by an outage of some sort such as a tsunami or earthquake, in which case all the planes using that airport could be rerouted to other airports that could accommodate them and that were not in the danger zone. Other airports and their control towers and systems would fill the gap.
In worst case scenarios, some could make emergency landings (like in the movie Sully when a pilot safely ditched a passenger jet in the middle of the Hudson river).
There is such a thing as uncontrolled airports.
But if I was flying from Atlanta to San Diego and all of California went down, I’m probably stopping in Vegas, Dallas, or any of the other long list of suitable airports.
Having atleast one diversion airport is pretty much a requirement. It’s just good decision making.
Anyways, so normally it works with 4 separate stages of flying, crosswind, down wind, base, and upwind. With a bonus of base becoming final when you’re lined up to land,
You announce where you are, what you’re doing, over a standard frequency commonly called CTAF or UNICOM.
This is how smaller airports work. Anything big enough to handle a commercial flight will typically have a full time control tower who tells you what to do. There are exceptions of course but most of the time, scheduled commercial flights = air traffic control.
For more info, you can see FAA-H-8083-3H which is the “airplane flying handbook” for free on the FAA website.
Pilots can operate without air traffic control. They do it all the time. At some smaller airports they talk to each other over the frequency to let everyone else know what they are doing (I am taking the runway for departure, I am turning left base to land…) this is referred to as a unicom frequency. Pilots also fly under specific rules sets (Instrument Flight Rules) IFR, (Visual Flight Rules) VFR, or (Special Visual Flight Rules). It’s just like it sounds IFR they rely on instruments and ATC. Whereas VFR they rely on being able to fly the plane on what they see.
If you’re talking exclusively about a loss of communication, the control tower has a light gun to signal the plane to let them know it’s safe to land.
In the hypothetical “Left Behind” scenario where everyone on the ground is gone, and it’s just a bunch of planes flying over empty airports..
After the initial confusion and panic, the pilots have training to land without guidance from the ground, and have communication channels to talk to one another in the air.
They’d probably work out who needs to land first, and take their turns one by one to do it.
They know full well that all of them attempting to land at the same time is just going to be a disaster and will do their best to avoid it.
They’re still going to be landing at the airport, there’s no better place than miles of dedicated runway to set a plane down, especially if no other airports are doing any better.
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.
So if for some reason the towers were inaccessible but radio still worked then all airspace would become like small commuter airports where aircraft communicate on a frequency where they can all hear each other. They also have maps to airports so they should be able to navigate via VOR beacons to a local airport that can support their aircraft, say this is flight 1 in the area, im going to land on runway xy in 10 minutes, possibly overfly the runway to make sure it is clear, then do a landing. Other aircraft in the area would do the same while trying to see and avoid each other.
Now if all radio went down, then I suspect it would be a case of try to get to an airport as soon as possible, overfly the airport to look for free runways and land ASAP, get off the runway. Some pilots might decide that civilian airports might be too congested and try to look for alternatives, like smaller private airfields, or even military airfields. As a last resort it might make sense to try to land in open fields, or if the interstates are cleared, those as well.
I would expect that a pilot, with all their training, would be able to navigate and land a plane. If that is a heroes task, then the whole industry should change.
Air traffic control is useful, but many pilots start their careers learning how to land at uncontrolled airports.
If there were massive and total failure of air traffic control, pilots in the air would would figure out a way to first fly based on visual avoidance of each other and then to communicate on common frequencies with each other to coordinate emergency landings at the nearest airports.
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