Originally Posted by
FullWings
I did a TRUCE day at Swanwick not that long ago (within the last 10 years I think?) and one of the practice sessions was a fallback to pen and paper as the screens blanked one after the other. I don’t think they’d start the day like that but at the moment the system fails there are still aircraft in the sky that need deconflicting...
The fall back system will usually involve urgently deconflicting, dispersing to adjacent sectors, landing those on final & stopping all departures: which sounds exactly like what happened in Switzerland. There's really no safe way to operate the volumes of traffic, in complex airspace, without the technology to do it. The analogy of your Kindle failing is apposite: procedural only works where there's insufficient traffic to merit surveillance; the separation standards required can't be implemented in the time or space available when the tech fails.