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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).

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> This is a system that's supposed to have it's own built in redundancy and must not go down.

There are contingencies for radio outages, but yeah, everything going down at once (if that's what's happening here, which I doubt) is bad.

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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.

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In the worst case: light guns and wing-rocking or flashing the navigation lights.
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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.
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Most air traffic is IFR. You definitely need radio for IFR traffic in for deconfliction in most of the world. (There's a few exceptions in very remote places, but that's mostly academic.) Even legacy procedural (non-radar) separation assumes you have working radio, and a radio failure is an emergency.

VFR traffic doesn't necessarily need radio, and is not affected by this groundstop.

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You don’t need radio for IFR (as the whole point of a flight plan is that if you lose contact you continue to fly your plan). But you kind of do need radar.
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You actually don't need radar, and ATC can do non-radar "procedural" control where they block off sections of airways or entire airports, one-in one-out at a time, like sections of railroad track. There are still a few parts of the remote US, as well as large sections of Northern Canada, where radar coverage is nonexistant and ATC is done via procedural control. Radar outages also happen on occasion, which would necessitate this.

As for lack of radio, this would only work if ATC blocked out your entire route from start to finish - which isn't practically ever done. Otherwise, they need to be able to maintain positive control over your flight since the airspace isn't reserved, which means conflicts are possible.

If you lose radio communication, it's an emergency and they'll move everyone out of your way. This doesn't work very well if everyone loses radio communication simultaneously.

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Right, but isn't a lot of that necessary radio aircraft-to-aircraft, like ADS-B? Obviously not ideal, but I thought IFR traffic could feasibly maintain separation without ATC help.
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ADS-B can't legally be used to maintain separation. It's only approved for use as an aid to awareness for additional safety.

Could you in an emergency, if you had no other options? Yes. But ATC can't legally give you a clearance that was dependent on using ADS-B for separation.

(Similarly, if there's a potential traffic conflict, and you tell ATC you see the other traffic on your ADS-B display, they just have to disregard that statement and assume that you can't see the other aircraft at all.)

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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.

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Multiple independent radios, for starters.
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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.
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