Originally Posted by
rickair7777
That is certainly what ATC would LIKE for you to do, and you could probably justify it as PIC emergency authority under normal conditions. ATC will get everyone out of your way and they will annoyed if you hold at the IAF for 30 minutes, shutting down SFO for arrivals.
But there is a reason that you have an ETA/clearance limit and are supposed to comply with it ...what if the comms failure is not just YOUR airplane?
Say Jihad Johny takes out one or more ARTCCs or their comms systems...all of the OTHER airplanes are going to be arriving, on schedule, at the same fix YOU are going to
In that scenario, it's probably best if you don't reach the IAF at the published ALT early. Hopefully your TCAS still works...
You would probably have some idea whether the comm failure was on your equipment or not.
Then in this scenario you could have multiple aircraft arriving at the same point, at the same altitude, with the same ETA all holding in IMC together. Sounds like another reason to get the heck out of dodge
!
So far, in the times that I have gone nordo, it has been fairly easy to tell what part of the system has broken down. Of course I usually had the ability to at least communicate with someone else using hand signals.
TCAS working
Well now we are talking about one segment of aviation. A true lost comm scenario as a single aircraft is true IMC enroute and all the way down to an approach was always one of the things that I most dreaded. Fortunately - my situations never combined all those ingredients together at one time.
USMCFLYR