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.
I’m a former airline pilot. There are procedures in place for this scenario. For instance, you could have a radio failure in instrument conditions and have to be able to safely land without guidance from ATC.
About half the airports I used to fly to were only controlled for part of the day, some, never had control towers.
When you land at these airports, you make location reports on a common radio frequency that all planes using the airport speak on. So, landing isn’t a big deal.
Now, if you were flying “in the clouds” in an IFR environment, it would get a little more tricky, but it’s still a standard procedure we all train for. All IFR planes carry charts that basically show you the highways in the skies. You fly between navigation beacons in the ground at a certain altitude which protects you from terrain and other traffic. In fact, you have to fly this way in non-radar environments.
Once you arrive at your destination, you “fly the entire approach” to the airport. What this means is, generally, ATC guides you to intercept the Instrument Landing System. But, on an approach plate, there’s a path you can fly in order to intercept the ILS (or other approach) yourself.
Now of course, most planes are equipped with GPS so this procedure is even easier. When I was flying, I was in a plane that didn’t have GPS. I also flew into a lot of little airports in the mountains in W. VA, PA etc. So often times ATC would lose us on radar because of the terrain and we’d have to fly full approaches.
If shit really hit the fan, the US interstate system was designed so that it can serve as emergency run ways. Iirc its something like 1 mile of clear straight flat road for every 5 miles of interstate. Presumably were possible, because i suspect this might not be doable in areas like the rockies.
ATC isn’t a single global system. There isn’t one event that would cause it to go down everywhere. If it went down at one airport or in some region, planes would be diverted away to other airports.
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