Approach - got me thinking

[Fuji Abound]

From personal experience the closest I got was whilst being vectored onto an ILS. All was going well and I guess I was at right angles to the glide slope, with no indication whatsoever of any communication problems. There was light rain in IMC. I was expecting to be “called” for the final time to intercept the glide and report established. In fact the call never came. I guess I was expecting the call to such an extent and had no reason to believe that it would not be forthcoming that I continued on across the glide on my right angled trajectory, thinking to myself this is all very odd. Fortunately I quickly realised I had a problem when my request “do you want me to continue on the present heading” met with no response and I turned myself back onto the glide slope. I never quite got to the bottom of the problem because box 2 also produced no response – strange because they are of course quite separate – however after a further minute or two box 1 came alive again along the lines “we have been trying to contact you” – I wonder whether it was a ground based problem. It was interesting that when in fact the radio failed of course you are not expecting it so of course the first indication you have of the failure is perhaps when you are expecting another call or make one yourself to be met by deathly silence all of which may be sometime after the last call! Lessons learned - well if I had had a hand held radio (which I didnt) it would have been vital it was to hand because it would have been a pain finding it whilst establing on and flying the approach, indeed I suspect it would have been better to continue without (the aircraft in question did not have an autopilot), squawking 7600 was fine and obviously identified the problem.

My original question was actually provoked by a friend flying a practice approach in VMC who was use to expecting “report base turn complete” or “report five dme” followed by the usual call “of continue descent with the procedure” or something along those lines. As another has said a precaution for the controller to reference the instrument traffic to other traffic to ensure separation is maintained. When the call never came (but not because of a radio failure) he hesitated as to whether to just continue with the descent or ask for clarification. The radio was busy, he was visual anyway and so continued as cleared.