Recent ATC outages

[dkkim73]

Hello All, 

I was just reading about an outage in Denver. Limited details but apparently some ability to have VHF comms was impaired. I also heard something about Newark previously.  

A lot of these stories don't contain the most reliable or hard details. Have any of you heard any more direct information? 

And, for any involved or who observed, was the surveillance and re-transmitting function of ADS-B still active (so you at least could see traffic)? 

Thanks for any info, 
DK

[N201MKTurbo]

I spent a few years in my youth doing land mobile radio work. I serviced some sites that had FAA equipment in the same buildings and would sometimes run into the FAA techs when they were working in their buildings and would get to see their stuff. This was always on top of some mountain you had to go 4-wheeling to get to.

Their equipment was almost always in sad shape. Like nobody cared about it. The FAA techs had a bad reputation in the industry. A couple of times myself and others would have interference issues caused by the FAA radios. Normally, when that happens, the two parties would work together to resolve the situation. The FAA techs were hard to get ahold of and if you could get ahold of them, they would just tell you to F-off and it wasn’t their problem. Of course we could see on our monitors that it was absolutely their problem. We reported them to the FCC, but they said they couldn’t tell the FAA what to do!

This was all 40 years ago. I have no idea what the current situation is.

[GeeBee]

Dead air is not new, just as drones over NJ or witches in Salem. 

[dkkim73]

1 hour ago, GeeBee said:

Dead air is not new, just as drones over NJ or witches in Salem. 

Wait, no the corporate media are telling me the sky is falling. Now some "Jeeby" on the internets is telling me it is not? 

Me confused 

 

More seriously, I'm  trying to get a sense if there's a simpler but interesting story. And also curious about the separation of our reception of ADS-B in...

[4cornerflyer]

While details of the Denver Center communications outage are lacking, it sounds like voice com was lost in one sector for a minute or two, but radar displays were not affected. Nor was ADS-B. This is most certainly not an end-of-the-world scenario, as controllers can call from adjacent sectors or on guard frequency and have aircraft move to another frequency.

I doubt this would be news if the stuff in Newark weren't going on. 

 

This is about the best article I saw...still not very complete:

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/15/us/denver-air-traffic-control-lost-communications

 

Jon

[76Srat]

Not trying to make light of emergency airspace issues such as the sad DCA debacle or any other mishaps (or worse) due to bad/mis-comms, but I can't recall any aircraft ever falling out of the sky just because control lost their comms or due to radio failure, especially for those on an instrument flight plan en route.  Pilots, on the other hand, have often forgotten the number one rule of aviating . . .

The media make this sound like the literal sky falls every time the screens go dark in the tower.  The sky doesn't fall when that happens. 

As to the issue of FAA tech and upgrades/maintenance, etc., just imagine if the US Govt was in charge of healthcare versus private industry running it.  Oh wait, that already exists:  check out your local friendly VA health system versus your local friendly privately-operated hospital.  You get what you pay for, which is where this is all heading anyway.  I hated seeing the WSJ begin to advocate for privatising the control of US airspace and using Europe and Canada as the best case examples for doing so.  Has anyone bothered reminding the WSJ just how few ops there are in Western Europe and Canada combined compared to US airspace?  It doesn't even compare.  

GA will get screwed yet again because the only paying passengers on board to pass through that expense like the airlines do are those of us paying for the plane anyway.

And if we think flying is expensive now, just wait until private equity gets involved in that.  Ross Perot's huge sucking sound just got its second wind . . .