They use third party telecom providers to relay communications between ATC “centers” and remote radio transmitters. It is not purely AM radio and outages have occurred in the past, most recently in September.

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/tech/a-calamity-disrupting-hundr...

Sure, but these are no longer connected to the controller's microphone via a long cord anymore.

That is true but nowadays the control rooms are separate from the actual antennas / areas being served. These are wired up with more modern comms.

I got this just now and seems like you know about this area

Attention: National Radar Outage

https://www.weather.gov/afc/radaroutage

Like the freezers in Europe?

There isn't really one. This is a system that's supposed to have it's own built in redundancy and must not go down.

Flight Service uses a different set of radios and can relay messages to ATC, but they've been slowly dismantled over the last two decades and wouldn't have the capacity to step in for an outage (nor should they be expected to - that's not their purpose).

Some aircraft have CPDLC for text-based communication, but it's asynchronous and you can't use that as a replacement for voice communication in the terminal environment. Also, many aircraft aren't equipped to receive it.

Pilots are trained on lost comms procedures, so if you're in the air and the radio fails they'd fall back to those regulations. Basically all the aircraft would fly their last assigned clearance, and attempt to deconflict manually with other aircraft over air-to-air radio (similar to flying into an untowered airport).

In the worst case: light guns and wing-rocking or flashing the navigation lights.

I would bet the problem is not strictly the radios themselves, they will still work, Planes can talk to each other and directly to airports, But that there is a large scale highly integrated control center network that failed, and planes can no longer talk to centralized traffic control.

So it falls back to local control, more in the style of visual flight rules. Pilots in existing flights will have to be vigilant and do their own deconflictation and new flights are banned out until the network is back up.

All conjecture at this stage of course, but all the radios won't just fail. It is probably going to be a poster child example about the dangers of large scale integration. The attraction of course is that integration is very efficient, the danger is it tends to fail all at once instead of in smaller pieces.

Technically, you do not need radios. There are many many uncontrolled airports in the United States, where you can technically fly around without establishing two-way radio communication. It’s doable, but I don’t know if that’s even a scenario pilots test in the simulator during their semiannual trainings.

AM Radios are literally everywhere, and very commonly available.

I would hope that airports keep a battery operated radio + antenna in case of emergency with them, to at least communicate with aircraft within visual range of the airport.

There is CPDLC or "datacom" that can be done via satellite, but I think most planes that have it, use it via ground-based radio.

Multiple independent radios, for starters.

This might be a serious question but it is also the funniest thing I've read all week. Thank you.

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50388001

From what I know of the ATC system it's closer to IBM System 360 then to Microsoft 365

Its more likely the route cause wich is Friday 13th

Microsoft 364

Am I missing something notable about today's date?

ATC radio is unencrypted analog for safety and communicability reasons, this shouldn't matter.

Based on what? Just wild speculation or something you've actually seen about the systems involved?