I’m not defending FAA at all, they are doing shit and overworked their employees for too long. But if you remove engineers and don’t invest in your ATC infrastructure during decades don’t be pikashu face shocked when it fails.
But it is also very easy to bring down those systems, it happened in my country several times and I’ve seen it in neighboring European countries as well.
You lose NTP for whatever reason? You lose radars because you cannot be certain a plot (the dot on the radar) is correct anymore.
You fuck up one part of the FDP (flight data processing) software update you fuck up everything. Because no flight plans = No correlation with the radar plots (a dot with a label become a simple dot lost among thousands of others), and you also lose your capacity prediction (I think that’s what they call SMART).
You lose the MET(eo) system you reduce capacity to at least 50%.
You lose VHF? Guess what… And VHF are old analog to digital back to analog, with modulation/demodulation of frequency to be able to transport voice between the controller mic to the antenna probably far away.
GND to GND voice is VOIP (probably not at FAA, lol) but GND to AIR is still old stuff.
Intercenter coms (sending an aircraft from one airspace to the next one, or OLDI in Europe) is also a delicate system and if you can’t transfer a flight to your neighbor or colleague you have to rely on good old phones, so reduced capacity.
To have the same for the national network you have to work at the ATC here, but everything ICAO is public.
And guess what? You lose the COM Center, you lose everything.
Of course they have network and system redundancies but shit still happens. France for example had its COM Center taken down by Italy a few years back.
Italy used a fucked up system they had no choice to use (from a Berlusconi company), this system sent erroneous data to the French, France felt for hours, closed sky etc. Redundancy, backups or not, as long as Italy was sending errors to them the core of the star network kept crashing every time they tried to get back up.
I have plenty more of silly examples like that around Europe and it’s one of the most funded and well managed ATC.
So FAA with no investment since the end of the Cold War? Yeah no shit Sherlock…
If you’re curious about how the civil aviation ground to ground communications works I think Wikipedia has some articles. Keywords would be AFS (aeronautical fixed services), AFTN (aeronautical fixed telecommunications network), AMHS (Aeronautical message handling system, formerly CIDIN which stands for I don’t Remember…)
PS: But closing the sky or reducing its capacity (so your flight is cancelled) is also a “good thing”, it’s done for safety reasons. We rather have you (you the pax, the self loading cargo) pissed off on the ground at the airport than dead in a crash because we weren’t able to guarantee a reliable and safe ATC anymore 🤷🏻♂️
Dave Gunson released a record/tape called What Goes Up … Might Come Down!” (1982). I think you would like it, if you can find a copy.
It’s a very funny recording of an after dinner speech which must still be available on the internet, by a British Air Traffic Controller who worked through the 70s and 80s. A great speaker. One of the things he covered was when the French went on strike. He would normally ring up his equivalent on the phone and pass him a group of dots. His French equivalent would say “Thank you very much” and they were his responsibility until he did the same and passed them to Spain.
Then one day, the phone was answered and the French said, “No thank you, we are on strike” and put the phone down. Gunson had to route his blips up and around French airspace for several days. They were only on strike for one day, and when they were rung to see if they would take some more blips they said “Certainly, it’s been very quiet”. They’d only had a one day strike, but hadn’t told anyone they were back so all international air traffic was still routing around their airspace thinking it was closed.
ATC expert here. Sorry for the long comment 😅
I’m not defending FAA at all, they are doing shit and overworked their employees for too long. But if you remove engineers and don’t invest in your ATC infrastructure during decades don’t be pikashu face shocked when it fails.
But it is also very easy to bring down those systems, it happened in my country several times and I’ve seen it in neighboring European countries as well.
You lose NTP for whatever reason? You lose radars because you cannot be certain a plot (the dot on the radar) is correct anymore.
You fuck up one part of the FDP (flight data processing) software update you fuck up everything. Because no flight plans = No correlation with the radar plots (a dot with a label become a simple dot lost among thousands of others), and you also lose your capacity prediction (I think that’s what they call SMART).
You lose the MET(eo) system you reduce capacity to at least 50%.
You lose VHF? Guess what… And VHF are old analog to digital back to analog, with modulation/demodulation of frequency to be able to transport voice between the controller mic to the antenna probably far away.
GND to GND voice is VOIP (probably not at FAA, lol) but GND to AIR is still old stuff.
Intercenter coms (sending an aircraft from one airspace to the next one, or OLDI in Europe) is also a delicate system and if you can’t transfer a flight to your neighbor or colleague you have to rely on good old phones, so reduced capacity.
Etc etc etc… So much stuff can take down a sky…
Civil aviation networks are built around a star shaped network at a national level. Those national stars are interlinked between them at the international level to form a meshed network, but if you zoom back to a national level you have a single point of entry to the AFS network, usually called the COM Center. You can find some (old) charts of those network in this ICAO document: https://www.icao.int/sites/default/files/EURNAT/Documents/EUR and Nat Docs/EUR Documents/EUR Documents/ATS Messaging Routing Directory/AMRD-Part-IV-COM-Charts-v18_0-v1.pdf
To have the same for the national network you have to work at the ATC here, but everything ICAO is public.
And guess what? You lose the COM Center, you lose everything. Of course they have network and system redundancies but shit still happens. France for example had its COM Center taken down by Italy a few years back.
Italy used a fucked up system they had no choice to use (from a Berlusconi company), this system sent erroneous data to the French, France felt for hours, closed sky etc. Redundancy, backups or not, as long as Italy was sending errors to them the core of the star network kept crashing every time they tried to get back up.
I have plenty more of silly examples like that around Europe and it’s one of the most funded and well managed ATC.
So FAA with no investment since the end of the Cold War? Yeah no shit Sherlock…
If you’re curious about how the civil aviation ground to ground communications works I think Wikipedia has some articles. Keywords would be AFS (aeronautical fixed services), AFTN (aeronautical fixed telecommunications network), AMHS (Aeronautical message handling system, formerly CIDIN which stands for I don’t Remember…)
PS: But closing the sky or reducing its capacity (so your flight is cancelled) is also a “good thing”, it’s done for safety reasons. We rather have you (you the pax, the self loading cargo) pissed off on the ground at the airport than dead in a crash because we weren’t able to guarantee a reliable and safe ATC anymore 🤷🏻♂️
Dave Gunson released a record/tape called What Goes Up … Might Come Down!” (1982). I think you would like it, if you can find a copy.
It’s a very funny recording of an after dinner speech which must still be available on the internet, by a British Air Traffic Controller who worked through the 70s and 80s. A great speaker. One of the things he covered was when the French went on strike. He would normally ring up his equivalent on the phone and pass him a group of dots. His French equivalent would say “Thank you very much” and they were his responsibility until he did the same and passed them to Spain.
Then one day, the phone was answered and the French said, “No thank you, we are on strike” and put the phone down. Gunson had to route his blips up and around French airspace for several days. They were only on strike for one day, and when they were rung to see if they would take some more blips they said “Certainly, it’s been very quiet”. They’d only had a one day strike, but hadn’t told anyone they were back so all international air traffic was still routing around their airspace thinking it was closed.
https://www.gordonpoole.com/talent/david-gunson/