Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop
by anamexis on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:31PM
(#50490075)
Radio is not a nationwide _system_ that can go down. ATC just uses basic AM radio for radio comms.
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Sure, but these are no longer connected to the controller's microphone via a long cord anymore.
Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop
by CircuitSeuss on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:45PM
(#50490305)
[delayed]
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.
[delayed]
Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop
by spaceywilly on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:40PM
(#50490227)
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...
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.
"modern" -> "we stuck digital computers into a purely analog pipeline to make sure it's capable of a wide range of harrowing, incomprehensible failures."
Re:FAA Issues National Ground Stop
by TacticalCoder on Friday November 13, 2026 @06:03PM
(#50491392)
> "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.