EdFred
Taxi to Parking
So a storm rolled through last night and the power went out at my place, and I got to thinking.
What happens if all the radar goes out for a large swath of airspace? Back when we were all on V's and J's separation becomes rather easy during a RADAR outage. Everyone is on a known, traceable, path, we report where we are, ETA for the next fix, and the controllers tell whoever to speed up/slow down/change altitude, to maintain separation. But now with "everyone" having GPS and being cleared direct across multiple sectors/centers the organized flow is now a random spiderweb of pathways.
So what happens if there's a widespread outage? I'm pretty sure the controllers aren't going to ask us to report LAT/LONG, ground speed, and a course heading and then they sit down with a giant sheet of paper and start making vector diagrams to see if 123AB is going to collide with 456CD.
What's the protocol if everything goes black?
What happens if all the radar goes out for a large swath of airspace? Back when we were all on V's and J's separation becomes rather easy during a RADAR outage. Everyone is on a known, traceable, path, we report where we are, ETA for the next fix, and the controllers tell whoever to speed up/slow down/change altitude, to maintain separation. But now with "everyone" having GPS and being cleared direct across multiple sectors/centers the organized flow is now a random spiderweb of pathways.
So what happens if there's a widespread outage? I'm pretty sure the controllers aren't going to ask us to report LAT/LONG, ground speed, and a course heading and then they sit down with a giant sheet of paper and start making vector diagrams to see if 123AB is going to collide with 456CD.
What's the protocol if everything goes black?