Jacksonville Center went ATC-Zero tonight

DC34ME

DC34ME

Pre-takeoff checklist
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Mar 5, 2010
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DC34ME
Came in for the mid shift here at Atlanta Center looking forward to an easy night. The telephone rings and my supervisor informs us that ZJX just went ATC-0. NOT good news to hear. 121.5 starts blowing up with calls and chaos ensues. My airspace butts up against Jax (south Alabama) so we start holding aircraft around MGM. Luckily a majority of my traffic was going to KPNS and KECP on the panhandle so the aircraft could descend into approach control airspace. I'm not sure what exactly failed in the ZJX system, but it took them an hour to get the backup system functioning properly. They just now started more or less normal operations. Interesting night for controllers and pilots. Was anybody here flying tonight? :yikes:
 
Could be an interesting experience, but I doubt I'd notice anything. Denver Center love dropping me quietly because of mountains. Somehow Albuquerque always try to leave me with instructions "entering radio blackout, in 60 miles attempt to re-establich on 13x.75 every 1-0 miles", but Denver just rolls up and leaves.

P.S. Not an instrument rated.
 
^True, but for controllers, suddenly losing radar and frequencies is pretty darn scary. We ranged out one of our scopes to see some of Jax Center airspace. We were able to separate two at FL330 coming together over SZW vortac. We only had comm on one of the aircraft. I'm sure TCAS would have done it for us, but glad we could talk to atleast one of the planes.
 
Didn't they move ATC from IBM mainframes to windows based servers a couple of years ago ?
 
DC34ME said:
^True, but for controllers, suddenly losing radar and frequencies is pretty darn scary. We ranged out one of our scopes to see some of Jax Center airspace. We were able to separate two at FL330 coming together over SZW vortac. We only had comm on one of the aircraft. I'm sure TCAS would have done it for us, but glad we could talk to atleast one of the planes.
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There's supposed to be enough redundancy that this "can't happen". I wonder what the cause was. IIRC SOCAL went blind/nordo last year when someone dug through all their datacomm feeds which weren't separated physically even though they should have been.
 
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