Questions raised over air traffic control communications failure

Corporate pilot J.P. Dyce is joining us live this evening. J.P., thank you so much for being with us. When you hear communication disruption, what comes to mind to you? The air traffic control frequencies. Now, this is a fairly... It's rudimentary type communications, it's VHF radio, it's the same kind of communications that's been used for eons, since the beginning of people flying airplanes, so this is not new technology. What first thing that came into my mind is this is probably something, and we don't know this is, somebody probably already has figured this out, but it is probably something to do with the center controllers, not so much say Orlando Approach or Orlando Tower or any Of those kind of controllers, it would be Miami Center, Jacksonville Center, some of the regional control, air traffic control centers, Atlanta Center, because they have repeaters around the area, and those repeaters have to talk back to their center, the physical building where those controllers are, and a lot of times those are carried by traditional old telephone lines. Sometimes it's fiber optic, sometimes IP, there's a number of ways for that data or audio to get back to those center controllers. So I think for what I've been gathering here, bits and pieces, that this is really the air traffic control centers. There's two in Florida, Jacksonville Center to your north. Jacksonville Center handles right around Orlando and then Orlando southward is going to be Miami Center. Can you, JP, that's a great point. I would love you to explain to our viewers what exactly those centers are responsible for. When a plane takes off, who are they talking to and at what point do they communicate with those centers and then they move on depending on where they're going? Can you explain that infrastructure a bit more? Absolutely. Most of the time when you hear people talk about air traffic control, the viewers think that's somebody in a tower. That's only one element of air traffic control. You have the control tower. Then you have the approach control that is around the airport, around Orlando. You have Orlando approach. Once you zip up above 10,000 feet, now you're talking to a center controller. So you take off, you're heading down south to maybe Fort Myers or you're going to Miami. You're going to be talking to a center controller. We have an airplane that we manage, and that airplane was going to Charleston today. It was landing about the time this mess started. And I talked to the pilots after they landed. They said, hey, we had no issue talking to Charleston Approach or Charleston Tower. Our first inclination, something was wrong. We were really not picking up Atlanta Center very well. We were at 28,000 feet and could barely hear them. So that was the first sign something was going on. So what we're looking at here is something that's a commonality among the air traffic control centers and not so much the approach or the tower controllers. So what, JP, do you think could cause something like this? A lot of people are speculating it may be tied to the Microsoft outage from yesterday. I mean, this is only the second time this has happened since 9-11. Well, number one, air traffic control, and as well as it works, it's old. It's a very old infrastructure. There's not a lot of modern equipment. If you go into an air traffic control facility, you went back to 1985 and looked at an air traffic control facility and looked at one now. It wouldn't be that much different. So that infrastructure is aging. That said, it's kind of a hard thing to hack because it is so old. You're not using computers like we think of computers that we would have in the newsroom or so forth. This is older technology, so it would be kind of difficult to cause a disruption that way. There are some fiber optic connections, and there's also some traditional type landlines that connect everything with phone companies, and that runs back to the air traffic control centers. So there's probably a breakdown somewhere. Somewhere there that's causing all of this problem. So I don't know at this point what that is, but that's kind of where this is, at least the way ATC works, it's kind of pointing in that direction. JP, before we let you go, just quickly, can you give us any indication of the stacking up of problems that something like this causes? There are folks we just talked to at MCO wondering if they're going to get on a plane tonight or tomorrow. Every hour that this lasts, the delays stack up and it's a domino effect, is it not? Can you give us some indication of what you think this could look like? Like... Yeah, it's going to be a mess for a number of days. You know, just magically, let's say Orlando was fine and Orlando could start releasing air traffic there. You're looking at all the other destinations and all the other places these airplanes are going. You know, New York's a mess. All of the big airports are going to be backed up. So it's not going to be something, even if they magically fixed it right now, it's probably still going to linger throughout the weekend to a certain degree because. As the longer this goes on, the worse it is going to get. There's even some planes out there that have probably landed at airports that are not even really set up for airline service because of necessity. They've had to land there and they basically make those decisions then on airport infrastructure, does it have the proper fueling capabilities and runway length. Yeah, it is going to be a mess for a while. People may want to consider renting a car to get to where they need to go. Yeah, at this point, they may all be sold out. Corporate pilot J.P. Dice, thank you so much for your time tonight. Appreciate it.