It certainly isn't a 'stupid' question, take a scenario, airborne from SPL, over London and talking to them, told to go get your Oceanic on box two, no contact box two and now, no contact box one or three, CPDLC just dropped out, HF won't work either, obviously a major problem down there in the avionics bay, what now? Are you going to continue Oceanic to New York? Yes, an enormous amount of redundancy is built into the systems these days but you cannot predict the extent of an avionics melt down that might wipe out your system redundancy.
A dozen pilots will give you at least six answers. 'continue as flight plan', 'declare an emergency and land', (they may not hear you), 'stay within the area in which you last had contact, go to Lambourne, (or appropriate hold, depending on LHR runway in use, if you know it), at cruising level, let down in the Lambourne hold and then join the ILS for LHR'? Suppose your transponder doesn't work either? Is your ILS reliable/working, do LATCC still have Primary radar?
There are Radio failure procedures printed on the appropriate trans-Atlantic and Pacific charts, the best advice I can offer is be familiar with these.
Remember the procedures are different if you have not received confirmation of radar contact. Imagine this scenario, airborne from Manchester for LHR, airborne and in a turn, told to contact approach, no contact by any means, what is the non radar contact radio failure procedure for such a case? (must not enter controlled airspace etc.!). This was a Command Assessment LOFT, fortunately I did' t get that one! Fun to fly though!
Last edited by parabellum; 15th Feb 2013 at 10:04.