Radio is not a nationwide _system_ that can go down. ATC just uses basic AM radio for radio comms.

spaceywilly 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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...

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lxgr 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

	▲	CircuitSeuss 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Crazy and stupid but true.
	▲	antonvs 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Back in the day they had long cords that went all the way to the planes, right up until the Great Plane Tangle of 1967.

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pests 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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NateEag 6 hours ago | parent [-]

"modern" -> "we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."

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afavour 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t think that it’s the wrong idea in general. AM radio (and humans sitting on either end) is going to struggle with the sheer amount of air traffic we have today.

	▲	tialaramex 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It's weird just how antiquated air radio is, compared to on boats. Digital Selective Calling is a 1980s technology. So it's not even XML stitched together with Java, it's way older than that. But it does mean two dozen boats and three shore stations can all communicate with each other without constantly stepping on each other or having to wait and hope you can talk to the person you want to before bad things happen. There are fancier more modern systems in place for a lot of transit, but DSC is relevant here because it's an international system, a random cargo ship from Korea which turns up in the English Channel has the same DSC system as the boat which just arrived from Rotterdam. This is the same requirement we need in the air, a Singapore airliner and an Avianca airliner coming into San Francisco both need the same radio system.

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TacticalCoder 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> "modern" -> "we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."

"we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline, now with software containing a near-infinite amount of lines of code generated by LLMs, to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."

And everybody here on HN applauds.

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7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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