Airport power outage during practice ILS Approach
Posted by QuietGarlic7788@reddit | flying | View on Reddit | 3 comments
Ran into an interesting issue yesterday when I was practicing my approaches where I lost the GS and LOC during my approach. Thankfully the published missed approach procedure for the airport is a GPS route, so I just continued with that while I did some troubleshooting.
My next indicator that something was wrong was that I was not able to reach tower over the radio, nor TRACON for the nearby Class B airport. I did some troubleshooting for the radio, tried a few different frequencies and wasn’t able to reach anyone. I tried the original airport’s tower frequency one last time before squawking 7600 and an airport ops guy responded and let me know that the airport had lost power and tower was closed.
I did some digging later and it seems like it was only the power grid around the original airport that had issues and I’m not entirely sure why I wasn’t able to get ahold of anyone else at any of the surrounding airports. Has anyone else experienced an issue like that? Anything I could’ve done differently?
KCPilot17@reddit
Find a center frequency or 121.5. That's about all you can do at that point.
BELFORD16@reddit
Tack onto this, all approaches are RNAV approaches if you have a GPS. To be clear, I’m not saying you should shoot an ILS in RNAV, but in the event you’ve lost your local ILS/VOR/NDB you can always flip back to RNAV to get yourself to the MAP (just don’t actually try to fly the approach, follow the path) and after that it’s 100% legal to fly the rest pink needles.
I’m sure someone will correct me that what I said isn’t 100% kosher, but I would rather trust an RNAV to get me to the MAP than to try to execute a missed with zero form of nav possibly outside of protected airspace.
rFlyingTower@reddit
This is a copy of the original post body for posterity:
Ran into an interesting issue yesterday when I was practicing my approaches where I lost the GS and LOC during my approach. Thankfully the published missed approach procedure for the airport is a GPS route, so I just continued with that while I did some troubleshooting.
My next indicator that something was wrong was that I was not able to reach tower over the radio, nor TRACON for the nearby Class B airport. I did some troubleshooting for the radio, tried a few different frequencies and wasn’t able to reach anyone. I tried the original airport’s tower frequency one last time before squawking 7600 and an airport ops guy responded and let me know that the airport had lost power and tower was closed.
I did some digging later and it seems like it was only the power grid around the original airport that had issues and I’m not entirely sure why I wasn’t able to get ahold of anyone else at any of the surrounding airports. Has anyone else experienced an issue like that? Anything I could’ve done differently?
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