Do these 3 things before closing this tab:
1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsPlan air traffic control continuity around the services that must remain safe and available—not around a list of backup devices. Identify essential functions and dependencies, define what happens when a facility or service degrades, agree on how responsibilities and communications transfer, and exercise the arrangements with the facilities and organizations that must make them work.
Requirements depend on jurisdiction. ICAO Annex 11 sets an international baseline for contingency planning by air traffic services (ATS) authorities; FAA operational contingency orders apply to facilities and services within their U.S. scope. Neither establishes one architecture or recovery-time target suitable for every facility.
Start with the requirements that apply to your facility
Before selecting backup systems, identify the applicable regulator, national rules, approved safety and engineering processes, and current facility directives. Treat international guidance as a baseline to interpret through the rules and implementation arrangements that apply in the relevant state.
- International baseline: ICAO Annex 11 says ATS authorities shall develop and promulgate contingency plans for disruption or potential disruption of ATS and related supporting services in their airspace. It calls for close coordination with adjacent ATS authorities and affected airspace users; Attachment C provides contingency-planning guidance. The available Annex 11 PDF is the Fifteenth Edition, July 2018, so confirm the current edition and national implementation before relying on it operationally: ICAO Annex 11 — Air Traffic Services.
- U.S. FAA example: FAA Order JO 1900.47G governs operational readiness and contingency planning for FAA ATC facilities, contract towers, flight service stations, and the U.S. NOTAM office within its scope. The FAA lists it as issued April 30, 2024. A notice issued and effective April 28, 2026 supplements the order for Flight Service Station OCP requirements and other updates, and is listed as cancelled April 28, 2027. Check the current order and notices rather than treating these U.S.-specific requirements as global rules: FAA Order JO 1900.47G record, FAA Order JO 1900.47G PDF, and FAA notice supplementing JO 1900.47G.
- Service survivability and power: FAA JO 6000.36B addresses resilience of critical NAS service threads and supporting infrastructure, including inter-facility communications. FAA JO 6030.20G says primary and backup power reliability and availability should be commensurate with functional and operational requirements; it does not prescribe one generator or battery configuration for every facility. These are FAA orders, not universal design rules: FAA Order JO 6000.36B and FAA Order JO 6030.20G.
1. Define essential services and degraded operating conditions
List the services the facility is responsible for, then establish the minimum safe capability for each relevant degraded condition. This should be an operational definition: which functions remain available, under what restrictions, and who may authorize that mode. Decide in advance who can declare degraded operations, invoke a contingency plan, transfer a service, or cease providing it—and what happens if the normal decision-maker cannot be reached.
#1 Best Overall
- Game Features:
- 🛫 Intuitive “draw-to-land” flight control gameplay
- 🌤️ Increasing difficulty as more planes enter the airspace
- 🚁 Mix of planes, jets, and helicopters to guide
- 💥 Avoid crashes and unlock new challenging levels Simple to play, hard to master — great for quick sessions or long playtimes
Do not begin with a generic promise to restore all systems within a particular number of minutes. The aviation sources cited here do not establish a single cross-facility recovery-time or recovery-point target. Set service-specific objectives through applicable safety and engineering processes, document the assumptions behind them, and identify the authority that approves them.
2. Map dependencies and credible failure scenarios
Trace each essential service through everything it relies on: operational systems, communications with other facilities, power, the physical site and access, qualified personnel, and external organizations. Mark shared dependencies. A primary system and its nominal backup can still fail together if they depend on the same site, route, power source, upstream provider, software, or staffing pool.
Build a hazard-and-impact table that links each scenario to the affected service, the operational consequence, the decision authority, and the preplanned response. Scenarios to assess include:
Rank #2
- Commercial power loss followed by backup-power failure or exhaustion.
- Loss or degradation of voice or data communications, including inter-facility links.
- Loss of, or unreliable data from, automation, surveillance, or navigation services.
- Evacuation, fire, severe weather, earthquake, or loss of physical access to a facility.
- Cyber or physical attack, operational error, or routing anomaly.
- Staffing disruption or a wider public-health or emergency event.
- Simultaneous degradation of a primary path and a backup that shares a failure cause.
This is a planning list, not an exhaustive set of hazards prescribed by the cited authorities. FAA survivability guidance addresses critical service threads and supporting infrastructure and identifies physical or cyber attacks, natural phenomena, and operational incidents among catastrophic-event examples.
3. Select continuity arrangements by retained capability
Compare possible arrangements by what they let the facility safely do, not by whether a component is labelled “redundant.” Options may include backup components at the facility, diverse communications paths, transfer of service or control to a support facility, moving personnel to an alternate location, or reducing or ceasing service under approved procedures. FAA Order JO 1900.47G describes operational contingency plan (OCP) networks, alternate locations, and transfers of control, airspace, frequencies, landlines, or surveillance feeds for facilities in its scope.
| Planning question | What to establish |
|---|---|
| Retained capability | Which operational functions remain available, at what capacity, and with what restrictions. |
| Failure independence | Whether primary and alternate arrangements share a site, route, power source, upstream service, software, personnel, or other likely common cause. |
| Transition and workload | The activation sequence, staffing and qualification needs, and the workload imposed on both the impacted and supporting facilities. |
| Operational constraints | Applicable airspace boundaries, routes, altitude or traffic limitations, communications, surveillance, and coordination requirements. |
| Activation and restoration | Conditions and steps to activate, sustain, and return from the arrangement, with the responsible decision-makers identified. |
| Verification | How the arrangement can be tested, maintained, and kept aligned with approved system configurations. |
Do not rank architectures without facility-specific safety, engineering, and regulatory evidence. A transfer arrangement, for example, depends on the receiving facility having the necessary capability, workload capacity, procedures, and agreed airspace arrangements—not merely a working communications link.
Rank #3
- - Air Traffic Control Simulator Clock
4. Make the plan executable
A contingency plan should tell the people who must act what to do, when, and with whom. ICAO describes emergency response plans as operational-level documents with specific roles, actions, and timeframes, and encourages business continuity plans for broader organizational resilience and recovery: ICAO Emergency Response Planning.
For each applicable scenario, document the items responders need rather than relying on informal knowledge:
- Activation triggers, decision authority, reporting level, and a fallback if the impacted facility cannot communicate.
- The primary support facility, other support facilities, external organizations, and current contact details.
- Controller responsibilities and approved operating procedures while capability is reduced.
- Alternate-location details, including transport, access and security instructions, and required personnel equipment.
- The airspace, routes, restrictions, communications, and information needed to transfer service.
- Technical configuration and verification steps for transferring frequencies, landlines, surveillance feeds, or other resources.
- Notification and publication steps, including applicable NOTAM procedures and content.
- Restoration coordination, return-to-normal actions, and a post-event review.
FAA OCP provisions provide U.S.-specific examples of network details, support arrangements, alternate locations, resource transfers, and NOTAM content. Adapt them to the facility’s regulator and approved procedures; do not treat them as universal requirements.
5. Design power and communications for the service
Power
Identify which loads must remain available to deliver the defined degraded capability, how the transition to backup power behaves, and how long the planned arrangement must be sustained. Record assumptions about fuel or replenishment, testing, maintenance, and site or environmental constraints. The FAA power policy supports matching reliability and availability to functional and operational requirements; it is not a complete power-system design specification.
Communications
Plan how personnel will communicate with aircraft, adjacent facilities, support organizations, and relevant airport or public authorities when normal systems are unavailable. FAA facility procedures require U.S. facilities within their scope to address interim communications during power outages and significant events and to maintain facility-specific backup-communications procedures. See FAA Facility Equipment — Communications Procedures; do not generalize those detailed procedures beyond their scope.
For each alternate path, verify the dependencies it shares with the primary. Two links that use the same physical route, site, power source, or upstream service may not provide meaningful resilience against the failure that matters. This is a design consideration derived from survivability planning, not a universal numeric requirement.
6. Coordinate the facilities and users that depend on the plan
Continuity often crosses organizational boundaries. Identify the impacted facility, primary and other support facilities, and every organization whose action is needed to sustain service. FAA defines an OCP network around these participants and requires collaborative development with network facilities within its scope; the network may include DoD, non-U.S. ANSPs, airport authorities, and others as appropriate.
ICAO Annex 11 calls for close coordination with adjacent ATS authorities and affected airspace users. Where a disruption could affect neighboring airspace, agree in advance where practicable on the contingency arrangements and how and when they will be promulgated. Confirm that contact routes, responsibilities, and transfer assumptions remain current as agreements, staffing, and systems change.
7. Exercise, measure, and revise the arrangements
Plans need rehearsal. For facilities within its scope, FAA Order JO 1900.47G requires at least one qualifying ATC-Limited or ATC-Zero operational contingency exercise annually by December 31; an actual ATC-Zero event does not count toward that exercise requirement. The order calls for realistic, detailed walkthroughs that do not impact the NAS, practical inclusion of the OCP network, and simulated movement of personnel and equipment. This frequency is a U.S. FAA requirement, not a worldwide standard.
- Choose a consequential scenario tied to an essential service and a credible failure mode.
- Include the impacted facility and the support network needed to execute the response.
- Walk through decisions, notifications, technical transitions, staffing, operational procedures, and restoration coordination.
- Record gaps as actions with owners and due dates; update procedures and training.
- Verify corrective actions and revisit the scenario when systems, contacts, or operating arrangements change.
Useful management measures include contact accuracy, time to reach decision-makers, successful completion of transfer steps, availability of communications during tests, exercise findings, overdue corrective actions, and recurrence of event causes. These are suggested measures, not universal standards. Report actual results only when they have been measured under stated conditions.
The Tool Desk
Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →FAA’s order explicitly treats exercises as rehearsal and a way to identify improvements. Its restoration provisions also make recovery an operational coordination task: confirm the required capability and safety conditions, coordinate with the OCP network and technical operations, and communicate status changes through established procedures.
Keep the plan current
Assign an owner for the plan and its contact lists, and define how changes to facilities, systems, routes, staffing, support agreements, and applicable directives trigger review. Recheck the governing publications before adopting procedures operationally: the FAA order record and notice status can change, and the linked ICAO Annex 11 PDF identifies a 2018 edition. A plan is useful only while its assumptions and coordination arrangements match the service actually being provided.
Quick Recap
Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.
