Five people on a flight from Kerry to Jersey received mobile phone text instructions from a quick-thinking air traffic controller when he guided them in to a safe landing at Cork.
In what air accident investigator John Hughes described in his report yesterday as a “serious incident”, the twin-engined Piper plane lost all onboard electrical power, communications and weather radar soon after take-off from Kerry airport on November 7th last.
He paid tribute to the initiative of the air traffic controller, saying the loss of all aircraft electrics during a flight “is considered very serious”.
When he realised his problem the 39-year-old pilot, with four passengers on board, gained height and flew south. With a radio communications blackout on board, the pilot used his mobile phone to repeatedly try to establish contact with Kerry airport and then air traffic control at Cork.
Eventually he managed to contact Cork on his phone, telling them about his problem and his intention to approach the airport from the sea.
He then lost audio telephone contact but the air traffic controller switched to texting and told the pilot that he had a primary radar signal on the aircraft and that Cork would allow them to land there. He then used texts to guide the 30-year-old plane in.
With no power the landing gear had to be lowered manually and the plane did a fly-past of the Cork control tower to check that it was successfully locked down before the plane landed safely.
“In this incident the positive and proactive initiative of the ATC controller, who, on realising that mobile audio communication from the pilot was intermittent, quickly switched to texting his instructions instead,” Mr Hughes said.
“This contributed to the safe resolution of the incident and, for such, the controller should be commended for his actions.”
Now this is a cool thing to note. Just like Morse Code works better for long range, I’ve noticed before that text messaging might work when voice calls are spotting (ie up in BFE).
FYi, you you are right. One reason i posted this is to prove again how smart Irish are. 
Tags: Aviation, Cell Phone, Intereting, Ironic, News
what I want to know is why they didn’t use the official ICAO light gun signals
cock off scrambles
I actually agree with Scrambles on this one. I’m a pilot myself and I understand that sometimes one has to be creative in solving problems in the air. In this situation though, there are standard procedures that could have, and should have, been followed to safely land that aircraft.
But as a pilot would you just crash into a crowded air envelope with no electronics? I’d say that if they hadn’t done this, there would of been some major issues.
If you were heading into busy air space, let’s say Class B or C, you would have to be in communication with ATC as far as 30 NM out from the field (if it were Class B). If they were outside of the airspace they could have just diverted to a smaller field outside of a congested area. Like I said, there are standard procedures for lost communication.
From what was said… was in such an area… lost all electronics so called them, but phone service was spotty. But luckily it was good enough for text messages. From the article, we’ve no idea if they didn’t direct him to a smaller field outside the are that could handle him.
Remember, this is Ireland, not US.
I realize it’s Ireland, but thanks to ICAO, as was previously mentioned, flying is almost identical in both countries. All of the details aside though, it does show some ingenuity on the part of the controller and pilot. My point is merely that such ingenuity seems unnecessary.
Okay, I realize the pilot was just trying to help, but we all know you CAN’T use a cellphone on a plane! He could’ve crashed it and killed everyone on board! What an idiot, just land the plane without trying to blow it up.