A good idea, but it's not going to work in every case. The airplanes I fly have 3 vhf reviewers, we only have SELCAL on 2 of those. We normally monitor 121.5 in the receiver which doesn't have selcal.

re. Putting range rings/abeams to show fir boundary, at best this is only minor help since many ATC freq changes aren't at an FIR.

Lonewolf, calm down dear; that comment didn't seem a slight, veiled or otherwise. It's a fact that if you put a heavily armed supersonic warplane close to an airliner which isn't expecting it, there's scope for things to go wrong, however professionally it's operated.

Yeah, but in the context of getting intercepted, the really critical ones are.

Ok, a squared, you fly through Russia/US/wherever with no comms but without crossing any FIR boundaries and let us know how you get on.

For some reason you're trying to put words in my mouth I didn't say. I'm not really sure why you're playing such a inane game, but nothing I said indicates I believe that you wouldn't eventually get intercepted. Of course you would, eventually if ATC was unable to re-establish communications. What I meant was that lost comms as you cross a FIR boundary more likely to result in an intercept sooner than a lost comm situation within the same FIR. Point being that frequency handovers are important everywhere, but more critical at FIR boundaries.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, a sq, just that it would only help in a small proportion of cases. As to the chances of interception, the main factor there is WHICH FIR. Some states (France) are very quick to give their boys some practice. Others (Switzerland) famously couldn't produce an interceptor even for a real hijack!

The UK CAA want to solve this issue punitively with unlimited fines for pilots. Interestingly there's no mention of any sanction for controllers who cause a loss of communication.

If that is the case (UK CAA fining pilots) then they are going to have to do something about the extremely busy frequencies. On some there is near constant talk, with no gaps, and it is exhausting having to listen to all that continuous chatter while also talking SOPs to our other pilot and the CM in the course of our flying.

Add in unnecessary chatter on 121.5 and the total amount of information we have to listen to and monitor sometimes becomes almost unmanageable.

Is there a legal maximum level of traffic in a given ATC sector, and if so does anyone know what that level is?