"Yep," she's saying apologetically to a person in first class, "the wifi's pretty flaky over the ocean. I'm sorry. Can I get you another drink?"

He's getting himself one. A Coke Zero, even though it doesn't taste the same as the real thing, in a big thermos rather than the little plastic cups. "The wifi is out?" The flight crew cares a lot when the wifi is out. The cabin crew does not really care at all but it's polite to at least murmur sympathetically. 

"Sure is. We've got some stressed out folks who are worried they'll miss an email."

"It's a Sunday morning."

"Is it? - huh, sure is. Well, we're at work, so're they, I guess." She stands by while the captain stretches his legs and fetches his sandwich; he tries not to take too long about it. And then she'll take the first class passenger his apology drink for the wifi outage which has lasted all of twenty minutes. 

"Hey, Davidson?"

He straps himself back in. The rule is maximum of ten minutes for breaks, because the one remaining pilot has to keep their full attention on the instruments and no one can do that nonstop for too long. There was a flight where the first officer was on a long break, the captain got bored and started taking pictures of the sunset in the cockpit, and a dozen people ended up with life-altering spine injuries.

"Yeah?"

"I'm not hearing any radio chatter at all. I know we're out over the ocean, but usually United 901 is twenty minutes behind us, there's some other folks out and about."

"I'll see if I can scare you up some company."

He can't.

It's not obviously that the radios aren't working; they report that they're working fine, he can apparently tune to different frequencies without trouble. 

"This is Southwest Airlines 8684, feeling a little lonely up here," he says, mostly jokingly, into the radio after a few minutes of nothing. 

"See what I mean? It's a bit uncanny."

"I'm going to run through the checklist for two-way radio communications failure," he says, slightly more tensely than ten minutes ago. The GPS goes out sometimes; the IRS will seamlessly reintegrate when it comes back. Radio communications failure is rarer and significantly more important. 

"Continue the flight by the route assigned in the last ATC clearance received. That's 1140, cleared at flight level 340 -"

"Up to 360 if we needed it to get over the top of that storm."

"Then I think you should actually take her into a bit of a climb, because the next thing here is altitude. Altitude should be the highest of the altitude or flight level assigned in the last ATC clearance received; the minimum altitude for IFR operations; or the altitude or flight level ATC has advised may be expected in a further clearance."

He tells the autopilot to take the plane to 36,000 feet. 

He's following the rest of the checklist, reading it out where relevant. Setting the transponder to 7600, which is the international radio code for 'this plane has a problem that's not a hijacking and not a threat to the safety of anyone on board'. 

In addition to monitoring the NAVAID voice feature, the pilot should attempt to reestablish communications by attempting contact:

On the previously assigned frequency; or

With an FSS or with New York Radio or San Francisco Radio.

If communications are established with an FSS or New York Radio or San Francisco Radio, the pilot should advise that radio communications on the previously assigned frequency have been lost giving the aircraft's position, altitude, last assigned frequency and then request further clearance from the controlling facility. The preceding does not preclude the use of 121.5 MHz. There is no priority on which action should be attempted first. If the capability exists, do all at the same time.

The checklist to try to get two way radio communications working again (they do not know if their outbound transmissions are heard or not; they make some with a summary of the situation and their intentions, three times, just in case) is a long one. This is soothing, because it's not untl the end of it that he has to admit to himself that the plane is out of radio contact with the ground and by then he's cheered himself up about it. It's a problem that is going to cause everyone else flying into LAX this afternoon some serious inconvenience, as all other traffic gets routed around the unpredictable plane, but it's not going to actually cause them that much inconvenience. They're not supposed to deviate from their flight plan; sticking to it is more predictable. Assuming the radios don't start working again in the next few hours for no clear reason, they'll head towards the airport as if they'd been cleared to do so and then just proceed on in to land as if they've been cleared to do so.

The electronic messaging system is also out, which is another troubling pointer at some kind of generalized malfunction.

(The traffic collision avoidance system seems to be working normally. The navigation still seems to be working normally. It's supposed to be good weather in LA. This could be a lot worse.)

"We don't have a runway at LAX." They change it up based on the winds. They'll have to just...pick one, and try to land on it.

Okay, yes, it could also be a lot better. 

"25L. It's the longest, it's the one they use for emergencies." Some airports switch runway directions based on the winds, and would be a nightmare to land on with no access to the weather. But LAX is on the coast and has predictable prevailing winds. You land over the water from 12am to 6am, and coming in from the east the rest of the time, and all four runways are parallel. 

"If the radios are fully nonfunctional, they won't see the 7600, right? Just hoping we're out there until we show up on ground radar?"

" - I doubt the radios are fully out. I admit I have no idea what's wrong with them. But yeah, could be they'll be fretting over our missed handoffs for an hour or two before we show up right on schedule. I guess they might send someone out to see if they can see us in the air."

"You pull that over DC, you get an escort. Not that I'd be upset, honestly, to see an escort right now." It'd help with the unpleasant prickling sensation of being completely alone which has been nagging at him since the radio silence got pronounced.

"We might have one way comms. Could be they heard everything we transmitted, and we just can't receive, and they're not worried except about all the paperwork."