Narrative:

The tower lost all radio communication. Apparently a contractor had scheduled the outage with our local af. The plan; as I later understood; was the local af technicians would assist the contractors to ensure that no interruption would occur. However; something must have gone wrong because the contractors took all the frequencies without warning leaving the tower positions unable to communicate. We were able to get one backup radio working and work around the problem. Af was made aware of the situation yet the same outage appeared to occur when the contractors were working on the approach control frequencies. At approx xa:00 the sgf approach radios went dead when the controller was vectoring a regional jet inbound to sgf for the VOR approach. When communications were lost; the jet flew through the approach course before contacting me on the local control position. I took control of the aircraft and re-vectored it back to final. Recommendation; af needs to insure that they are monitoring their contractors so that a massive loss of communication does not occur.

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Original NASA ASRS Text

Title: SGF controller described a complete communications failure event; alleging local AF technicians and a contractor failed to coordinate correctly.

Narrative: The tower lost all radio communication. Apparently a contractor had scheduled the outage with our local AF. The plan; as I later understood; was the local AF technicians would assist the contractors to ensure that no interruption would occur. However; something must have gone wrong because the contractors took all the frequencies without warning leaving the tower positions unable to communicate. We were able to get one backup radio working and work around the problem. AF was made aware of the situation yet the same outage appeared to occur when the contractors were working on the approach control frequencies. At approx XA:00 the SGF approach radios went dead when the controller was vectoring a regional jet inbound to SGF for the VOR approach. When communications were lost; the jet flew through the approach course before contacting me on the local control position. I took control of the aircraft and re-vectored it back to final. Recommendation; AF needs to insure that they are monitoring their contractors so that a massive loss of communication does not occur.

Data retrieved from NASA's ASRS site as of April 2012 and automatically converted to unabbreviated mixed upper/lowercase text. This report is for informational purposes with no guarantee of accuracy. See NASA's ASRS site for official report.