Hacker News Reader

It sounds a lot better in the tower and cockpit. Much better receiving equipment, much closer proximity. The tower doesn't broadcast at high power because it doesn't need to. These ATC recordings are only available for us to listen to because someone volunteered to record and upload them; that someone probably doesn't live in the airport.

That said I still made out Delta 29 Heavy just fine. Maybe it's years of listening to these recordings.

Edit: Notice how the plane inbound and 4 miles out sounded a lot better? They were probably a lot closer to the person recording. That's how it should sound.

> It sounds a lot better in the tower and cockpit. Much better receiving equipment, much closer proximity. The tower doesn't broadcast at high power because it doesn't need to. These ATC recordings are only available for us to listen to because someone volunteered to record and upload them; that someone probably doesn't live in the airport.

This is the main reason, but it's important to note (as others have) that you simply get used to imperfect radio signals - go listen to the VATSIM community, and even some of those can be relatively difficult for a layman to parse. But you quickly get used to it, and it becomes second-nature to pull out the relevant bits of a callout without much thinking, based on what calls you expect at any given point in the takeoff/landing/flight

I was flying into Atlanta international when thousands of planes were relocating from Florida to avoid a hurricane (ie so planes parked on the ground don't get damaged).

I believe at the time it was the busiest day for an airport in history.

That's when it finally made sense to me why they talk that way. Sometimes they need to

Oshkosh the day before Airventure starts is fun to watch and listen. They paint colored dots on the runway so they can leapfrog other planes on the runway. There are special rules in place instructing pilots to not talk back unless requested to do so or it is really needed. They acknowledge transmission by rocking their wings. I have seen 5 planes touch down on two parallel runways within a few seconds.

These people are sending and receiving these messages all day every day their whole professional lives, I think it just comes naturally that they would end up communicating like this. The jargon may make sense to you when you read it but you're still not used to hearing it spoken which is why I think it's harder to comprehend (I feel the same way). Professionals can probably comprehend it quite well.

There may be advantages to making everyone speak more slowly and clearly but given the amount of messages passed back and forth over these channels I suspect it would also have a significant cumulative impact on throughput.

Air traffic communication is structured and a very limited subset of English. It makes more sense if you remember that that first call in the video isn't coming out of the blue - the pilot of Delta 29 Heavy would have already been in contact to start taxiing etc and is expecting a pending authorization call, knows the format it will take ('call sign - command - modifiers/watch-for'), and then it's all read-back anyway to make sure there's no misunderstanding.

The communication gets much clearer and less staccato when something is going on that's not regular - my favourite example is an incident at JFK where a taxiway was unexpectedly blocked and you can watch the Russian pilots struggle a bit to explain[1], presumably because 'cones' isn't in the normal ATC glossary[2]

[1] https://youtu.be/YmywjMQDbos?feature=shared&t=77 [2] https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/media/pcg_4-03-...

> when he's saying "Delta 29 Heavy", I cannot for the life of me make out a "nine" in there

Delta two niner heavy.

Sometimes these videos have worse audio than what was actually heard by the pilots and ATC because they're recorded from somewhere else with worse reception. But it's not only that.

It's amazing how much we've stretched this way of communicating into a very safe industry by the numbers. Maybe the remaining failure modes are now showing up. There's an almost accident where the plane reached only a few feet of altitude on approach to Paris well before the airport because the controller gave bad information and the read backs were not enough of a check. There's another almost accident where the controller didn't receive the communication that a plane had aborted takeoff because another plane talked on the same frequency at the same time. Maybe there is now value in having a more standardized digital messaging setup for key moments that augments the normal audio conversation. There is so much that is tipified that it seems that could actually reduce the workload if done with good UX.

In "The Right Stuff" Tom Wolfe claimed that pilots talk like this because they are (unconsciously, due to cultural reasons) imitating a famous/high-status fighter pilot from many years ago called Chuck Yeager, who had a West-Virginia drawl.

Every reply is saying the radio’s clearer for them, they’re used to it, etc., but I’ve also heard pilots complain that talking fast like this is a problem because as always some people take it to extremes. The fast mumbling seems to be a kind of symbol of experience in aviation culture: https://youtu.be/picf7sPEhi8

The mumbling blows my mind. I flew with a former coworker a few years ago, my first private flight in decades. While very cool, and knowing a lot of information is pretty rote or trivial for them, I was astounded how much they (ATC, other pilots, and my pilot… mostly the latter two) mumbled, trailed off, or mixed things up because they were talking too fast. I do realize that speed is paramount to clear the channel and that nothing was actually wrong but it was still jarring to witness.

Note that “9” is pronounced “niner” on the radio.

JFK airport is one of, if not the largest, crossroads of the world. Everything from the barrel of accents on the radio to the line of multi-coloured penises taking a leak in the men's room[1] - the world comes together in these few square miles.

To expect that all the pilots speak English with perfect Siri-like diction is at best silly and at worst offensive.

[1] this is a subtle reference to comedian Louis CK lamenting travel as a single father, being forced to take his daughters into the men's room of an international airport - where the alternative of leaving them outside, alone and unattended, was a far worse option

The (US native, presumably) ATC staff speak worse English than the (presumably) non-native English speaker pilots, at least from all the ATC clips I've heard -- JFK and NY region being about the worst. Combining that with bad recordings and it's often difficult to understand, even as a native English speaker with a fair bit of familiarity with aviation (worked with pilots, although mostly rotary and military, working on a PPL)

Non-native ATC staff speaks better English because they are non-native. They have to mentally "switch" to a different mode, so it is their second nature to stick to standard phraseology. The ATC staff outside NA talks to more non-native pilots than native ones, so even if they wanted to deviate from standard phrasing there's a decent chance the pilot wouldn't even understand them.

On the other hand, ATC staff in the US talks to mostly native pilots in their native language. It's really easy for them to use non-standard phrasing or slang, and most of the time it'll work out okay. With the exception of some key items like "cleared for takeoff" the FAA just doesn't really seem to care about it, so ATC will keep doing it.

I could understand the delta two nine heavy quite well in this example.

But I think it’s also something you get (and have to get) used to.

Also the spoken word does not correspond 1-to-1 to the subtitles, in the sense that 4L is „four left“ for example, and K4 is „kilo four“.

As a private pilot with a level of experience not even in the ballpark of these professional pilots, I can say you get used to it. The “trick” is that most of these phrases are expected, and they come in a certain order, at certain times. It’s a bit like running a decision tree in your head. So e.g. you as the pilot would know that, as you’re taxiing up to the runway for instance, they’re probably gonna tell you to hold short, or to line up and wait. If it’s mumbled that’s fine, you get it.