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FAA investigating after pilots heard meowing, barking over radio at DCA (www.nbcwashington.com)

submitted 15 hours ago by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world

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[–] tal@lemmy.today 15 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (2 children)

I bet VASAviation has it. They're pretty good about having ATC recordings of anything in the news up.

searches

Nope, but it is on YouTube anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qVOMskSH4

EDIT: Though they do have a recent recording of ATC and pilots talking about pizza toppings, which is more-or-less in the same "it's technically not necessary to have on the air and shouldn't really be there, but it's at a level where it's not really causing a problem".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94qVOMskSH4

I suspect that if the airwaves got too crowded, they'd transmit "break, break" until they got through and ask people to tamp it down.

EDIT2: Though...you can still get someone stepping on a transmission. That is, it's not just inability to get through, but sometimes someone will transmit and not realize that someone else is transmitting. That's caused some real problems in the past, including partially contributing to the Tenerife disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster

On 27 March 1977, two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on a runway at Los Rodeos Airport (now Tenerife North–Ciudad de La Laguna Airport) on the Spanish island of Tenerife, killing 583 people and injuring 61 others in the deadliest accident in aviation history.[1][2][3][c]

The controller then immediately added, "Stand by for takeoff; I will call you",[4] indicating that he had not intended the instruction to be interpreted as a takeoff clearance.[25]

A simultaneous radio call from the Pan Am crew caused mutual interference on the radio frequency, which was audible in the KLM cockpit as a three-second-long shrill sound (or heterodyne). This caused the KLM crew to miss the crucial latter portion of the tower's response. The Pan Am crew's transmission was "We're still taxiing down the runway, Clipper 1736!" This message was also blocked by the interference and inaudible to the KLM crew. Either message, if heard in the KLM cockpit, would have alerted the crew to the situation and given them time to abort the takeoff attempt.[26]

I guess maybe radios could be made to be capable of detecting conflict, buffering a voice transmission, and then immediately transmitting it afterwards.

[–] skuzz@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

The radios aren't even digital, or even FM. They are AM so multiple can talk at once. Such an entrenched technology that would take decades to replace across the planet. Buffering could reduce some cross talk, but at the expense of possibly dangerous delays.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Such an entrenched technology that would take decades to replace across the planet.

I don't think that it'd really be necessary to alter the underlying protocol (well, you could make something a lot more elaborate with designated "receivers" and acks of transmissions, but I'm talking about something analogous to what humans already do, retransmitting in the event of collision). Humans do have to figure out whether someone's transmitting, but the reason you don't hear static on analog radios constantly is because they have a squelch feature, detect when there's a transmission present; the radio is already looking at the signal sufficiently to do the necessary work.

[–] empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 13 hours ago

AM allows multiple to talk and also allows edge-case signals to be received. FM and digital is way more sensitive to weak signals being washed out where as even a washed out AM carrier can often be picked out of the noise enough to realize someone has a problem.

[–] cravl@slrpnk.net 6 points 13 hours ago

I presume that would mean a transition from analog to digital, which would be a whole thing. (Probably just the unit, digital transmission would not be backwards compatible.)