I listened to the audio book of “The Only Plane in the Sky” (do recommend), and they played real recordings of ATCs on 9/11 as the planes were hitting buildings.
It was surreal listening to them talk about the catastrophe but all while maintaining a total sense of calm.
During my Interaction Design master I had to read a paper about the interface design for tools aiding people in these kinds of jobs. The designers spent a lot of time observing them at work and concluded that one specific feature of this work environment was that it doesn't have a "normal" situation and "emergency" situation, it's a non-stop juggling of emergencies all the time. Which I guess is part of why they stayed calm: you can't switch to panic mode if you're already constantly in that kind of stress situation, and anyone who can't handle that will be filtered out of those kinds of jobs very quickly.
Glassdoor says they earn $30k - $64k yet lots of us earn more in our comfy office jobs typing code into a text editor, kinda puts things into perspective.
It's amazing how much leverage an employer has when they have the legal right to simply fire everyone, and there is no recourse for the employees because the employer is the federal government itself.
We found truck drivers loaded up with $262,898; city painters making $270,190; firefighters earning $316,306; and plumbing supervisors cleaning up $348,291 every year. One deputy sheriff earned $574,595 last year – including $315,896 in overtime
As a Canadian, I'm horrified—HORRIFIED!—by the legal theft called "taxation."
Those pampered government employees up here with their unions and pensions and benefits. It's awful. All they do is make our country work. If only we could get rid of them all and let private enterprise take over.
Think of how much better our country would be if we scrapped public transit and let Uber and Lyft take over everything.
Likewise, we could get rid of our ridiculously terrible public health care and adopt a sane model where the market provides. After all, markets mean efficiencies, that's why Americans pay less for healthcare, and get better outcomes than socialist hell-holes like Canada and Germany and the Nordics.
If taxation is theft, we should not only be able to fire people who are paid with our taxes, we should be able to jail them as accessories to the crime, and make them stay there until they pay back every ill-gotten cent.
To be really blunt, I reckon it's just supply and demand: there's not that many jobs (relatively few airports in the world compared to other entire industries) and a relative lot of people who love it, and would rather do it than earn a bit more at a lower stress higher paid similarly skilled desk job & hobby listen-in/plane-spot.
I don't think that quite holds up. Sure, lots of people want to do it, but lots of people want to be professional athletes or surgeons or [insert prestigious job here] as well. Similarly, this kind of work is extremely demanding, and very critical - the consequences of incompetent traffic controllers would be disastrous - so there's still a low supply of people who actually are a right fit for the job. In a sane job market that should still give these traffic controllers some bargaining power.
Then again, I guess braythwayt's comment[0] is real-world proof that we're not really dealing with a sane job market, so I'm clearly missing something crucial in my line of thought here.
Thank you, his air traffic control paper was definitely one of the papers involved, but I couldn't quite remember the right name of the design field - "computer-supported cooperative work"[0] - so I failed to find it again. I also read few other ones, including one about the London underground that described a situation where these traffic controllers were both looking at their screens, but also constantly listening to their colleagues in their periphery. This let them adjust their strategies for handling emergencies on-the-fly as new information became known[1].
Wow, thanks for the link. Morbidly fascinating to hear it happen in real time. Looks like there was a huge lack of clarity during the whole thing - I bet this spurred big changes in the way ATC, towers and military interact.
Speaking of, and coming up on the anniversary in September, here is a description of what a passenger experienced in a plane on that day:
"On 9/11, I was listening to Ch. 9. I was on a flight out of ORD to AZ (757) seated in 5F. We had just taken off and where climbing to cruise. A flight out of Rockford, IL was squeezing between us and the UA in front of us. I watched as he lined up to get on the highway westbound. Then, abruptly, the Rockford flight called ATC and requested immediate clearance to return to home. ATC responded with some quick direction and asked if they were experiencing trouble. No, just directed to return home by company pronto. Hmmm, strange I thought.
Then the UA in front of us requested emergency clearance back to ORD. Loooong pause from ATC. Now, this is Chicago Center air space. There are no pauses. Certainly not 30-40 seconds of dead air. Hmm, man that is weird, I thought. Then like a starters pistol went off, the comm light up. Another plane req. clearance, then another, another.... boom, boom, boom. Nothing from ATC. I nudged the guy next to me and said put on Ch. 9. He could see by the expression on my face, I was serious.
ATC got on the air and started by saying this was going to go quick and pilots needed to listen up. "Protocol responses are not required, just do exactly as I say quickly". Then it began. "UA ###, turn right heading blah, blah expect Springfield airport. SWA ###, turn left heading blah, blah expect Rockford. Delta ###...." This went on for about 3 solid minutes before I rang the bell for the FA who was passing out breakfast. Our number had not yet been called. The FA came by and I said "We are all going back to O'Hare, they are landing every plane in the sky. What is going on?!?" She looked at me in disbelief and kind of leaned down to look out the window. I could see that she was about to start to tell me not to worry about it when we pitched right at about 45*s. It was so quick it nearly dumped the FA in my lap.
Her expression changed quickly. I could see she knew that was no turn you make in a 757 under normal conditions. She said, I will be right back and picked up the comm. She went flush. Not saying a word, not "ok", not "goodbye", not "I understand"... nothing, she hung up the phone. I don't know why I remember that she did not respond so vividly in my mind but it took the whole thing up a notch for me. I knew she thought this was very serious and was scared. She walked right back to me, scooped up my tray and said in a voice full of authority, "Pull up your chair, put away your tray table and buckle up, now. We are landing in a few minutes. The pilot will be on with more instructions in a few minutes." I was frozen. In the ten steps it took her to get from the phone to me, her whole demeanor changed from shocked to pissed.
By this time, ATC comm on ch. 9 had been cut off. We were pitching left and right, then right and left and descending fast. It was about 5 minutes before the pilot came on and said "Ladies and gentlemen, please listen very carefully, We have been instructed by the FAA to land immediately. There has been a security breach in the system and we will be on the ground in Chicago in a few minutes. Listen carefully to the FAs instructions and do as they as say please." click. Huh!?! Instructed by the FAA? Not ATC... FAA!! Whaaa?!? Security breach in "the system"? What does that mean? Did some guy run through the check point at the airport? Now, I was scared.
A couple more minutes of quick turns and fast drops go by. The pilot (a woman, I don't know why I mention that but I remember it clearly) comes back on the comm. "This is the captain. We will be landing quickly in Des Moines, IA. Flight attendants, please prepare the cabin." click. Hard turn right, hard turn left... the FAs are barking out instructions on the comm. Now I can see planes everywhere around us. There had to be a dozen so close I could tell the company clearly. I could discern the 7-5s from the 7-3s, the AB320s from the 319s.
We were at about 8 thousand by now. It was less than 3 minutes since we last heard from the pilot and she was on again. "This is the captain. We will be landing at the Quad Cities airport in 4 minutes. When we land we have been instructed not to approach the terminal. Please remain calm and we will back with instructions as soon as possible." click. Now I could hear a woman crying a few rows behind me.
Our last turn to hit the glide path was so sharp I could see the corn rows in the fields below. There was a SWA 7-3 easily within a mile and a half behind us as we fish tailed, it seemed, into runway alignment. Gears go down way late. We are going much faster than a normal approach. 2k now.... 1500, 1... touchdown... hard. Heavy brakes for a good bit then they release and we roll all the way down to the end and turn right toward the terminal. I look back down the runway and the SWA 7-3 is about 500yrds off the end of the runway. This would have been a "go around" under normal circumstances. Behind Southwest, they are stacked up on a string. 8-10 planes maybe... boom, boom, boom. Big ones too.
"Oh, my God! Oh, my God!" I hear a voice behind me. I turn, it's a man on his cell. 'Two planes hit the WTC. They are on fire...both buildings." We are in the terminal in a flash it seemed. I made a few calls and went to the rental counter and secured a car (a fire engine red, Dodge minivan) before I sat in this tiny airport and watch TV for about 4 hours. By the time I decided to go back to Chicago, the rental counters were chaos. I slowly made my way through the crowd announcing rides were available back to ORD for any takers, follow me out. Outside I turned around to see I had five takers, 2 men, 3 women. One was a UA FA. We barely spoke a word the whole way back. I don't even remember any of their names. ORD was closed and I dropped ‘em off one by one at various places around the city. Then home for me. I'll never forget where I was or that Ch. 9 was a part of it. I still have the stub from the flight. UA 1969, ORD to Phoenix, seat 5F.
Thank you for posting this. Everyone has their "where were you" story from that horrific day, but I never get tired of hearing them for some reason. Hard to believe it's nearly been two decades - I can still almost feel the chill in the air of that morning, it was an absolutely perfect fall day on the East Coast.
There was a window cleaner trapped in an elevator between floors who used a squeegee to stab the plaster and escape.
When I last worked it out - he had about 7 minutes to escape the area of collapse. Intense when you're half way up a skyscraper with no working elevators.
Yeah it is impossible to forget. My wife at the time and I got a call waking us from a friend telling us to turn on the news. It was all surreal from that moment on. The second plane may have just hit the second tower by the time we turned on the TV and they didn't know quite what happened yet.
I am not even from the United States and I got a call to turn on the TV.
That was before the second plane. I couldn't believe it. We did have access to US channels and the reporters appeared to be confused when the second plane hit and thought it was a replay.
I've never lived in the US either, but I got a phone call from my partner who was panicking about George Bush starting WW3. I said that wasn't really a concern, it was just a terrorist attack and you can't really nuke terrorists.
To be fair, we never really know what some of the more loopy US presidents may do, though.
Great post. I was confused by "channel 9" since I thought there may be rules or regulations against receiving ATC on a plane, but for anyone else who didn't know exactly what it referred to, it is (was?) an inflight entertainment feature of United Airlines.
Yes. One of the greatest perks of United that they eventually phased out.
You'd tune your headset to Channel 9 on most aircraft and list to ATC just between the tower and your plane. I'd listen to it many times just to understand when we'd get a delay, maintenance issue, airport slowness..etc.
It got me over my fear of flying because I got to learn what the pilots (and the Center) thought about the turbulence we were experiencing and how they were responding to it.
It also inspired me to write the original version of this Wikipedia article
It was just a channel on the UA entertainment system (audio) where the pilots could choose to make the ATC transmissions audible to the passengers (if desired). It was highly spotty because enough pilots had bad experiences (or believed they would) based on passengers asking them annoying questions or reporting things that didn't need to be reported, or generally causing more trouble than it was worth.
I don't have a 9/11 flying story but exactly the week before 9/11 my family and I flew United 93 from Newark to SFO. I was woken up at 6 AM by my family in New Jersey calling me to tell me they were all safe which confused me until I booted up my computer and saw the headlines on Yahoo! News. I didn't save my boarding pass stub.
A friend of mine had just been married in Europe, and was in the air over the Atlantic on the way to his honeymoon in Hawaii when this happened. His plane was diverted to somewhere in Canada (New Foundland?), and he got to spend his honeymoon in a school gym on cots.
US closed the border and airspace, and all sorts of international flights had to find somewhere to touch down. The huge Cold-War-era airport at Gander is now mostly one of the two major ATC zones for the North Atlantic flyways, and usually gets a few diverted flights a day. That morning, they got 38 planes, including a lot of widebodies. 7,000 passengers and crew, with an indefinite stay (ended up being like 3 days) in a town with 10,000 residents. The town of Gander (and surrounding hamlets) put everyone up. It's a sweet story from a tragic time. Gander's the only place outside of the US with a monument from WTC steel. There's a catchy Broadway soundtrack (haven't seen the play) about story called 'Come From Away'.
I recommend listening to the flight director loops from the Apollo missions. There are thousands of recorded hours available (various places, but try lunarmodule5’s playlists on Youtube, or https://apolloinrealtime.org/ for a museum exhibit style) - including practically the entirety of missions 8 to 13, and most especially try the notorious manual burn of 13 during which everyone sounds like they’re discussing where to have lunch, not undertaking an extraordinarily difficult and dangerous manoeuvre in a crippled spacecraft.
Sometimes I put them on as working background audio, it’s tremendously soothing.
I've always loved Kranz'(?) comment even more than the moment of first contact itself. As if to say "Stop cashing out on one historic achievement and work with us to make many more".
There are youtube videos of ATC recordings (with transcripts) of pilots losing their cool. You are right, I don't think any ATC lost their cool in any of the recordings I've listened to.
A tower controller at an airport talks to planes in the air as they arrive and depart. They are in the tower so they can see the planes visually, and may also have radar available.
Ground control also works in the tower, after all they have to be able to see the airport taxiways. They may also have a separate ground radar. They are only talking to planes on the ground.
At a busy airport, these will be separate individuals working each of these duties.
At a less busy airport, or during quieter hours, the same controller may work both tower and ground simultaneously.
There are also "center" controllers who work in the enroute traffic centers. They are not in towers and often not at any airport, as they talk with planes at altitude and work by radar and voice communication, not visual.
For example, in a typical departure, you first talk to ground control for taxi clearance and instructions. When you are ready for departure (near but not yet on the runway!) ground will say "contact tower on 123.45" (or whatever frequency), and tower will clear you for takeoff. After you've taken off, tower may say "contact center on 124.56" (again, whatever the frequency is).
While you're flying, each center controller will hand you off to a different center (and different frequency) which you cross between the different areas that the different centers cover.
For landing, it's the same thing in reverse order: center hands you off to tower as you approach the airport, and after you're on the runway, tower hands you off to ground (who again is up in the tower, but only talking to planes on the ground) for taxi instructions.
And the reason why ground controllers often have much higher workloads is that at a busy airport things happen far quicker on the ground. Every plane you move you pretty much move another plane into its place.
Thanks for that! It's interesting (to me) that they descend (well, ascend!) into politeness with both pilots and controller addressing each other 'sir'.
Most of it is just using the ICAO/NATO phonetic alphabet to identify taxiways by their one- or two-letter codes. It makes a bit more sense if you have a JFK taxiway map in front of you.
You don't need to be physically sat on the plane to emphasise with the severity of the situation. It's not like ATCs are willing pilots to die. And sometimes not being able to physically control the actions of the pilots can add to the stress.
I can relate to this from rock climbing. Typically one climber at a time leads while the other belays (manages the rope). The leader is the one at physical risk but the most scared I've felt has been belaying.
Being the belayer means you don't have much control and are mostly just watching closely and hoping your buddy doesn't get hurt. Being in a scary lead situation forces you to concentrate which pushes a lot of the fear emotions aside. Worry and fear take a lot of energy, energy which often can't be spared in an emergency where you have some control over the situation.
The point of the conversation was about which is more stressful. Obviously having "more skin in the game" would directly increase the stress levels but yourself and others who posted like you completely miss the point that the ATCs are there to ensure safe travel and they very much are invested in that mission too. Comments like "well they're not going to die so why would they lose their cool" are just harsh and entirely miss the point of why the ATC are there in the first place.
The key reason for why ATC don't lose their cool has nothing to do with who is more stressed or has more "skin in the game" and everything to do with the fact that if ATC lose their cool then the pilot is more likely to die... and possibly other planes and their passengers and crew too. In order to save lives ATC have to keep their cool even when everyone else around them panics. That's the real crux of the matter.
In addition to what you say here, most of the ATC job is about maintaining order and safety, while for a pilot there are many other factors (and accidents happen when pilots get distracted by those other factors). The ATC is constantly thinking about possible accidents, while the pilot has more opportunity to have their thoughts elsewhere.
The term I've heard is 'task saturation' and I absolutely love it (the term, not the situation). (The solution proposed is usually to pull some science staff from science into operation, which luckily didn't have to happen so far.)
Probably, people regularly place their own lives as a much lower priority than the group their part of. I assume most air traffic controllers get emotionally invested as their actively talking to the pilots involved.
That really depends on the person and situation. Some people get really emotional, but it’s also common for people in highly stressful life or death situations to emotionally shut down and end up going through rote responses. This is dangerous because you effectively lose creativity and can easily get stuck in a loop repeatedly doing the same things.
One example is WWII commanders would sometimes continue to bring ammunition to machine gun nests even when just adding it to large piles. It may have been the best option when they start, but they never revisit that choice. The same thing happens to pilots where people investigate a crash and find pilots keep doing the exact same thing that’s not working for several minutes without considering that perhaps some assumption they have is wrong.
Finally, some people don’t seem to react much at all to such personal risks.
I heard a Cessna ask for a readout of its ground speed.
'90 knots Center replied.
Moments later,a Twin Beech required the same.
'120 knots' Center answered.
We weren’t the only ones proud of our ground speed that day
as almost instantly an F-18 smugly transmitted:
'Ah, Center, Dusty 52 requests ground speed readout.'
There was a slight pause, then the response,
'620 knots on the ground, Dusty.'
As I was thinking to myself how ripe a situation this was,
I heard a familiar click of a radio transmission coming from my
back-seater. It was at that precise moment I realized Walt and I
had become a real crew, for we were both thinking in unison.
'Center, Aspen 20, you got a ground speed readout for us?'
There was a longer than normal pause
'Aspen, I show 1,942 knots.'
No further inquiries were heard on that frequency.
That story is often told but is generally considered apocryphal. There is too much wrong with it procedurally. It's funny, but not likely a conversation that actually happened.
I haven’t looked that far into it, I just watched that video when Youtube recommended it. The written story that I’ve seen online was uncredited, so seeing someone talk about it made it seem more likely to have occurred (at least to me).
It's not unreasonable that the SR 71 was listening on the frequency of the airspace beneath them - if the're had been an emergency, it's always better to have a picture of who's on the frequency/within that airspace.
Dont under estimate what the military get up to. The MK1 Lynx helicopter (Westland Lynx) didnt have a black box flight recorder, and as it had the world speed record, many pilots when entertaining new recruits would attempt to scare the wotsit out of them by flying over the mountain tops of Wales before nose diving the chopper towards the valley floor to see how fast they could get it to go. Noisy! On a par with flying with The Blades who are ex Red Arrow pilots.
The upthread-linked Reddit debunk [0] is A) SR71 would've been on a different frequency to both other planes; B) ATC computers at the time were capped at 990 knots; C) SR71s' speeds were classified, no way the crew would've asked or ATC responded with it.
Correct, people keep repeating this story - it's false. I know controllers who have actually controlled the U2 and SR71 and they've explained why it's not true (they don't use the same freq, etc.).
Also Brian Shul (the originator of this anecdote) and his RSO were the only SR71 crew removed from the program. There is a reason for that.
Would you mind explaining the reason? His Wikipedia page [0] doesn't mention anything, although it does mention the story with four citations. One explicitly states "Though they didn’t really control us, they did monitor our movement across their scope." [1]
Off topic, but be sure to run Javascript on theaviationgeekclub.com or else the code that breaks your clipboard will fail to run.
The SR-71's top speed is still classified to this day, partly because they probably still don't know what it was, because nobody ever got one there. Shul's plane was cruising probably far below max speed (the number wasn't 1942, I don't remember exactly what he said it was).
As to "not using the same freq", military aircraft have radios with knobs that turn. They can certainly monitor and talk on civilian frequencies if they see fit to do so, and they fly in and out of civilian airports regularly on ferry flights (not the SR-71 obviously, but I know for a fact F-18s do all the time, because I used to stand duty at a command that owned a bunch of them and we had to file reports on what airport they were at). If they can't talk on civilian frequencies, how would that work? And they fly through civilian ATC owned airspace, they absolutely have to talk to civilian ATC.
As to Shul being removed from the program, have never heard that -- I'm not likely to take the word of some random on the internet about it.
Even after the transatlantic world record "fastest air-breathing manned aircraft" flights in 1976? Especially if they were flying below the record speeds (depends on the exact numbers, going by wikipedia, the record was for approx. 1905 knots, which of course is lower than the figure in the story)?
(But, yeah, I've heard plenty of people, including other SR71 pilots in interviews, question the validity of Shul's stories)
The SR-71's "speeds" are not classified. You can even download the long ago declassified manual that says what the max mach number it can display is.
The actual top speed might still be, if it is, it's probably because they don't actually know what it really is. There have been multiple pilots who have said they could pretty much keep giving it gas and it would keep going faster.
Come on, I didn't claim that. I responded to 'someone on HN claiming to have a pilots licence' who couldn't see a reason it wasn't plausible. I'm just offering three anti-plausability reasons someone else on the internet had.
In the original version I read they were in a blackbird and the pilot wanted to request the ground speed very badly but felt he shouldn't because he didn't think his partner would find it appropriate. Then just as it seemed like the opportunity was going to pass he felt the radio click and his partner requested the airspeed. They were a real crew after that.
I am pretty sure that ATC is trained to sound calm. I’ve been listening to ATC recordings at the worse the emergency is the more calm the controller is. I think it is deliberate to help the pilot concentrate and not panic.
Listening to the atc recording of Southwest 1380 incident, the pilot goes "we have an engine failure and I'm told a passenger has been sucked out" there's a pause and ATC goes, with some shock in his voice, "what?" Before the pilot responds, he quickly recovers and goes "it's not important, which runway would you like" and carries on as normal.
Amazing professionalism - and the whole thing is worth a listen to, but there wasn't any shock - he didn't even mention it, just presumably updated the medical team he was sending to the runway.
https://youtu.be/cnSizWZVyD4?t=387 at 6:50ish in this one at responds. "You said there is a hole and someone went out? It doesn't matter, we'll work it out. The airport is just off your right." I guess it's not as "shocked" or "in disbelief" as I remember it being the first time I listened to it. (I vividly remember the first time I heard this, hence why I had to go look for it or figure out what I was remembering.)
A pilots job is to "aviate, navigate, and communicate", in that order. It's improper for ATC, especially in an emergency, to be asking them for irrelevant details as it's forcing the pilot to consider the question, which takes mental energy away from aviating and navigating.
There's probably recordings publicly available somewhere, but I thought the same thing when listening to the Columbia disaster.
It was the first space disaster play out in real time over the internet. NASA streamed mission control communication on their site. We got everything unfiltered. The nation just lost a pride and joy, and mission control was incredibly calm and professional throughout. I was constantly hitting refresh on Slashdot, and then someone posted, "NASA just updated the mission status page to 'Lost'." It was just so weird looking at those words on screen.
I was still in school, and science class happened to line up with the [Challenger] disaster. We had a substitute so I was used to that class being Bedlam anyway.
I walked in and didn't believe people when they said what happened. (I had a similar reaction when my spouse woke me up at the crack of dawn by announcing "They knocked down the Towers!") Then the sub rolls in a TV cart. Oh.
The other thing that struck me was that nobody editorialized what they were seeing. I knew that the twin smoke trails spiraling off to the sites were the SRBs, three seconds into the video. There was nothing else they could possibly be. But the announcer was very clear to say they might be the SRBs but we don't know anything yet. As an adult having sat through many lower-stakes RCA and production outage situations, I can respect their reserve. As a child it just made me even more upset.
I've got a few years on you evidently; I was in a college mechanical drafting class that had just let out after the disaster. As it was at UCF east of Orlando, I had to but look East and see it.
Heh. Yeah, they're clearly confused with Challenger.
A ne'er-do-well kid ran into my elementary school classroom and exclaimed, "The space shuttle exploded!" and the teacher turned on the TV.
For Columbia, I was driving to get bagels for breakfast. I was on the I-80 to I-5 interchange in Sacramento, CA when I first heard on the radio there was something wrong.
Yes, was thinking Challenger; where the SRB's that <parent> mentioned were relevant. Columbia I saw on TV with my toddler, who's a sophomore in college now.
I keep remembering hearing Capcom keep saying "COLUMBIA HOUSTON,UHF COMM CHECK OVER" You could just tell every time he repeated that it just got harder and harder for him to say it with out cracking.
I went down the rabbit hole with this yesterday. Capcom on that mission was Colonel Charles Harbough, himself an astronaut. Looks like he retired from the military and flies for FedEx.
My father was a corporate pilot. Occasionally he had flights alone where he was picking up or delivering materials or light freight. He used to occasionally pull me out of school as a kid if he was flying alone, and I would ride in the right seat.
Once, flying from Western NY to Peoria Illinois, the tower came on to ask if he could find a pilot in the area, single engine, that was lost and in a slight panic. They new where he was, he had his transponder on, but were having difficulty getting him to follow directions. We were flying a light twin turboprop (Mitsubishi MU2-B) which can easily drop to low air speeds. We found the guy, and he followed off our left wing, so my father could keep an eye on him, and we took him to where he had clear visual of his destination airport. We then just continued on our way.
I had a headset on, and the flight controllers were so calm talking to that other pilot. It was like listening to Fred Rogers. I think my father only said a dozen words the whole time, acknowledging the request, declaring visual, and declaring visual on the airport.
We just continued our trip, but we did hear the other pilot declare base and final.
Yes. They use left/right. Port/starboard is useful when you have a crew of people running around doing jobs aboard a three-dimensional ship. Pilots are never more than two people sitting in fixed seats facing forwards. It is a much more linear environment than a ship.
A lot has been carried over. The alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie,...), units (nautical miles and knots).
Right of way rules are similar sailplanes have priority over powered aircraft, otherwise the one on the right has priority and in case of a face to face, you should turn right (or go up/down, but certainly not left)
They didn't completely reinvent navigation for aircraft and a lot of carry over is expected. I'd say port/starboard vs left/right is more of an exception than a rule, generally the same conventions are used when applicable.
Phonetic alphabet is more a radio convention than a navigational convention, and is also used by terrestrial radio users (ie military). Alfa/bravo/charlie was adopted as a NATO standard in the 1950’s; during WWII the US and U.K. used the able/baker/charley phonetic alphabet. And I think aviation adopted the NATO standard before maritime radio.
In sailing, the red/green lights help determine right of way and give way.
If to starboard red appear, tis your duty to keep clear.
Red Right Returning is used for coming into port in the US. However, in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, parts of Africa and most of Asia it is the opposite.
Pilots tend to not be oriented in any direction other than forward, unlike those aboard a boat who are more likely to be facing all manner of direction and an unambiguous term is needed.
They say left and right as others have noted, but the main boarding doors on planes are supposedly on the left for the same reason the left is called the “port”. It appears to be a relic of the flying boat era of aviation.
There are a lot of such relics in aviation, for example distance is measured in nautical miles, speed in knots and the uniforms and ranks are also very much like their naval counter parts.
Nautical miles are used in navigation because one nautical mile equals one minute of latitude when you're traveling North/South, making it a very useful unit of measurement on oceans. Planes use it for the same reason. A knot is simply a speed of one nautical mile per hour, so it's a useful unit for speed when you're using nautical miles for distance.
So I wouldn't call these two specific examples relics, but I agree with you on uniforms & ranks.
Naval vessels also can and occasionally do use left/right when talking about some things (like heading changes) where the direction is expressed relative to the current heading, and would not be ambiguously interpretable. It's not common though.
I haven't downvoted it personally, because I would really really really love it to be true - but it's been "debunked"(if you can call it that). I suspect some of it is true - but not exactly as told.
> I used to be a controller at Los Angeles Center in the 90's, and worked Aspen SR-71's (and later under the NASA callsign when they flew them out of Edwards AFB). They could hear ATC but not other aircraft, because civilian aircraft are on VHF frequencies, military on UHF, and anybody above 60,000 feet (like the SR-71's) were on a separate, center-wide UHF frequency so they wouldn't have to switch frequencies constantly. So the SR-71 and F-18 pilots couldn't have heard those other aircraft requesting groundspeed, or heard each other for that matter.
Wait...military planes only have a single radio receiver? Military spy planes only have a single radio receiver?
I imagine they have multiple receivers and can listen to any number of frequencies at once, but as a pilot you won't be listening to civilian frequencies....because why would you? It's just noise that's getting in the way of the mission.
That's covered in the original story. This was a training mission, to get the crew up to the number of hours needed to be cleared to go on real missions. The reconnaissance systems officer (RSO) was the one listening to all the radios, not the pilot.
This seems a perfectly sensible thing for the RSO to do on a training mission, since on a real mission he might need to monitor multiple frequencies:
> I was beginning to feel a bit sorry for Walter in the back seat. There he was, with no really good view of the incredible sights before us, tasked with monitoring four different radios. This was good practice for him for when we began flying real missions, when a priority transmission from headquarters could be vital
At this point, they have passed their hours threshold and are heading back home. The pilot says:
> Just to get a sense of what Walt had to contend with, I pulled the radio toggle switches and monitored the frequencies along with him.
Few aircraft have "receive only" radios, most have full Transceivers.
For redundancy they have multiple Transceivers, and most military radios cover both VHF and UHF.
For safety and redundancy the pilots can receive and transmit on any of their multiple radios just by (selecting the appropriate frequency) and pressing the appropriate Receive/Transmit selector buttons.
Many military aircraft also have secure (spread-spectrum) transceivers as separate units.
Many aircraft that fly over water also have VHF Marine radios fitted.
This has less to do with coolness than with the fact that the controller will most likely not be able to see the guy on the ASR, and I would assume that the guy has no transponder either. You can only control the airspace if you can see who/what is around.
All of the conventional radar systems installed at airports are blind to this small human jetpack due to their limited resolution.
The newer type of radar for detecting debris exist at some airports but because of their main purpose is to monitor debris on the runaway it is only for short distance and not pointed to the sky.
The main purpose of the PSR is to detect potentially dangerous flying objects which have no transponders. The PSR we tested were able to also detect e.g. parachutes and paragliders. I would assume that the radar cross section of the winged jetpack is large enough for detection by current PSR.
Depending on the angle of incidence relative to the radar, the cross-section can be quite large. But the resolution of the radar is almost certainly not sufficient to see the small object near the aircraft.
“Tower, there’s a guy in a jetpack flying outside.”
“Copy. To your left or your right?”