Are my ears bad or are air traffic conversations unintelligible?

Factual Questions
21

While I was there, it was Bunker Hill AFB and later changed to Grissom AFB, Indiana and then I moved to Spangdahlem AFB Germany.

22

Her response was the ATC equivalent of “did you Google it?”

23

I listened to Joey P’s youtube from post #3. Several thoughts:

  1. The fidelity is poor and there’s a lot of rushing static noise behind each transmission. That’s common for ground receivers a few miles away from the airport. That rushing is mostly absent for the real people at the airport.

  2. JFK Ground Control is the big leagues. A layman not understanding it is about like a Tuesday night softball league batter being buffaloed by MLB pitching. IOW, totally to be expected. And that was at an offpeak time. You *really *don’t want to listen in at 6pm or when there’s weather.

Conversely, I closed my eyes and actively listened as we do. Within a couple minutes I had a mental model of where all the airplanes started from and where they were going. And had a pretty good moving picture of how they were probably progressing. It just comes with practice.

  1. To make any sense of ATC radio you really need a map of what they’re talking about. For the JFK ground control you need this: http://flightaware.com/resources/airport/JFK/APD/AIRPORT+DIAGRAM/pdf (small PDF). I have that on my screen while taxiing there and have most of it memorized in my head. Listening to the tower controller it’s also useful to have that map. For approach & departure radar controllers there’s another set of maps that help to make sense of what they’re probably talking about.

Trying to understand what’s being said without a map and some concept of each players’ intent is like trying to transcribe a conversation held in a foreign language.

e.g. Spanish is pretty phonetic and I speak it a little. But don’t ask me to play stenographer between two native speakers talking about something I have no idea about. I hear all the sounds; most sounds form syllables, and some even form words. But the whole thing doesn’t add up to concepts. It’s collectively just a rush of noises.