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Comment by xpe | Hacker News Reader

> without keying the mic

I’m not following

'keying the mic' is turning on the microphone

It's very likely they said some less polite words like 'WTF ARE THEY DOING' before turning on the mic and acting all professional

While that's certainly possible, in my very limited experience, the more dangerous things are the more professional the response.

Sure there's the initial surprise, sure there's the post-mortem release of emotional energy, but after the initial surprise it's all business. The pilots are communicating with each other, there's a lot of information, and tasks, to keep them occupied.

Relentless training for situations that "never happen" means that professionals go into a low-emotion state, and rely on memorized behaviours and checklists, coupled with intense intellectual evaluation.

See the audio from sullys Hudson landing. It's all simple communication, coupled with drilled responses (restart engine, start apu etc) being driven from cool analytical data processing - what will work, what won't etc.

Training the emotion (panic, fear etc) out of you is the very goal of training for extremely intense, life threatening, situations.

If the cockpit recordings are released it'll be interesting to know if I'm right, but the level of professionalism displayed by the FedEx crew suggests to me that they are both highly trained, and worthy of that training. Congratulations to them and their trainers.

> It's very likely they said some less polite words like 'WTF ARE THEY DOING' before turning on the mic and acting all professional

Reminds me of Air Canada 759[1]:

> The pilot of United Airlines 1 (UA001), the first in line for takeoff, interrupted the radio traffic at 11:56:01 p.m. and asked "Where is this guy going? He's on the taxiway."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Canada_Flight_759

I am fairly certain that those choice words where exchanged at the water cooler at a FedEx brake room way after the incident. And even then I'd suspect the attention to be more on the "dear god, we have all been lucky to still breathe today* instead of cursing at some other people. That kind of behavior is what you get from real professionals.

My neighbor is a FedEx pilot. Based on the stories I've heard the pilots probably used very colorful language in the cockpit but were screaming for the sheer joy of finally getting to do something exciting now that they've retired from the Air Force or Navy. That's what the "Thank you" to ATC was for.

When I've had to take preventive action the profanity came after, not before

The conversation that we hear off the tape is only when the mic is keyed. There was probably a lot of discussion going on in the cockpit when the microphone was not live.

Are such conversations typically made available to the public, perhaps when the report comes out?

I believe it’s standard practice to publish tapes of the radio transmissions, but not from the cockpit voice recorders. They do publish a transcript though, if it is relevant.

We're only hearing what was broadcast on the radio, but not everything said in each cockpit.

Pressing the button on the microphone so that what they say is transmitted to others.

Without pressing the button that turns on the microphone for transmission

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