Radio is not a nationwide _system_ that can go down. ATC just uses basic AM radio for radio comms.
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.
loading story #50490305
loading story #50490776
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."
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.
> "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.
{"deleted":true,"id":50490206,"parent":50490075,"time":1794605982,"type":"comment"}