Are you permitted to listen to music? Or an audio book?
Audio books would be practically problematic as you’ve got a pretty continuous chatter from the radio (less so trans-oceanic) and humans really suck at processing two independent streams of voice.
Older aircraft universally had a ADF radio which could pick up commercial broadcasts in the AM band. These are becoming rare. Long haul airplanes have HF radios, and there are some music stations on HF, although fewer all the time as things like BBC world service transition to the internet.
Listening to that falls in the gray area of technically verboten but culturally tolerated.
The intent behind the regulations & policies is that pilots should be thinking & doing nothing other than attending with 100% attention to the work at hand. The reality is that’s impractical in extended cruise. While TPTB accept that in concept, they don’t have a way to write a reg which delineates that acceptance. So it drops to corporate culture, corporate QC, & daily peer pressure to maintain the right mix of strict adherence and plausible “close enough good enough” actual behavior.
I have it on good authority that pilots are not allowed to post to SD during flights. Or so I have been told.
There’s also a part 2, and I thought that one was even funnier.
LSL, I have heard that below a certain altitude (IIRC 10,000 feet) pilots are not allowed to discuss anything but the flight, and can be disciplined severely for disregarding that rule.
I haven’t seen part 2. Care to share a url?
Yes. Below 10,000 above the takeoff or landing field elevation is called the “critical phase of flight”. All that air time plus all the time taxiing on the ground is 100% business 100% of the time, no exceptions. Everybody from the Feds to management to the individual pilots are real serious about this one. Different countries may have different details, but the idea is pretty universal in commercial aviation.
The job is weird in that in one sense we’re micromanaged up the ass and in another sense we’ve got complete freedom from management oversight. As such it’s your own professional discipline and a healthy dollop of peer pressure that work together to enforce doing the right thing in all the ways and all the places and times that FAA & ATC & management can’t be and can’t see and can’t know.
About 30 minutes into the flight, the captain comes on the intercom and says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now at cruising altitude, the seat-belt light is off and drink service begin shortly”. Thinking he turned the mic off, he says, “Fuck it! The Auto-pilot is on. I’m out of here for a while. I’m gonna go take a shit then get a blow-job from that hot blonde stewardess”.
The flight attendant hears this and runs towards the cockpit to tell the captain he’s on the intercom.
A little old says, “No need to hurry, dear! He said he was taking a shit first!”
Here’s part 2.In trade for the link, please explain why the pilots in the comments section are dying over the ‘Guard Police’ bit.
I suppose it was different back in the days when crew and passengers were allowed to freely mix and the pilot could go back and talk with passengers or help serve coffee or something.
There are 2 VHF radios (at least). #1 is used for talking to ATC and #2 is for talking to the company, ground handling agents or whatever. When #2 isn’t being used it is tuned to the emergency frequency 121.5, often referred to as the “guard” frequency seeing as you guard it in the sense of monitoring.
It is quite common for pilots to accidentally transmit on 121.5 instead of the ATC frequency if they’ve just been talking on comm 2 to the company and have forgotten to change the selector over. When this happens someone will inevitably jump on to inform you of your error by saying “you’re on guard!”. These people are politely called the “guard police”. This in and of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there’s not much more frustrating than listening to a forlorn pilot trying to contact ATC on the wrong frequency and sometimes someone has to put them out of their misery by letting them know why no one is responding. It gets a bit ridiculous though when the calls of “on guard!” clog up the emergency frequency more than the people making the erroneous calls. What is worse is when you are deliberately using the emergency frequency to try and contact someone, as in the video, and the guard police keep yapping at you. There have been cases of legitimate MAYDAY calls receiving the response 'on guard!"
Or vica versa. Two of my friends had the cockpit jumpseat because all other seats were filled. The cabin staff choose someone who was young enough not to care about the jumpseat, and young enough to be interested, and blokes, because it was a pretty blokey culture. They talked about sports, and flying, and politics and stuff.
The only airliner that could fly as high as 50,000 feet was Concorde (which typically cruised at up to 60K feet*). Other jets have a ceiling in the circa 40K feet range, but usually fly at 30-something thousand.
- I only flew Concorde once, and it was only after burning off quite a bit of fuel that it managed to reach 60K feet.
True for airliners but business jets fly high. E.g., the Gulfstream GV has a ceiling of 51,000 as does the GVI.
You know, one time I was offered this. I declined. My Dad was a pilot on small planes and I didnt care for it. Looking back I wish I had so as to have the experience.
Interesting (if unfortunate). The issue reminds me–and “unfunny” is operative here–of the 9/11 terrorists who used the wrong setting and transmitted their instructions to their victims to the ground unknowingly.
Which channel did they inadvertently use?
I distinctly remember, on more than one occasion, being invited when I was a kid into the cockpit of commercial airline jets to look around. And no, I was not asked about my taste in magazines.
Thank you.
That’s pretty funny, although I preferred the first episode. For sure #2’s annoyances are just as real, but #1 was more accessible to the layman.
I see **Richard Pearse **has handled the Guard Police.
At least in the US I hear a real generation gap. The old guys, generally ex-military, consider any *faux pax *on the radio to be a sin, and treat Guard with a reverence. The 20-somethings flying RJ’s are “Like what3ver dude. Chill. I pushed the wrong button; get over it already.” So when a Guard war breaks out it’s usually the oldsters saying to shut up and the youngsters saying to shut up about shutting others up.
In a funny combo of the two episodes you’ll occasionally hear “work, work, work, work” in that special resigned & numbed tone of voice go booming out into the silence on Guard or the oceanic air-to-air common freq. Sometimes it gets picked up and repeated by others. But it never gets Policed. Some things are truly Sacred.
Interesting: the sociological currents of technology use are obviously of huge interest nowadays with, you know, theinternet ans stuff; to see other kinds of change, using mature technologies as a stalking horse is refreshing, especially so, I think, for the severely circumscribed situation here.
In contrast to social interactions among military personnel in grenade handling, for example.
I flew the KC-10 in the USAF for a few years. On long-haul cargo missions, it would get a bit boring as LSLGuy mentioned, unless you had an air refueling en route. You really had to be on your game to get your jet on the boom for 15 minutes, else you have to divert (the KC-10 could receive gas as well as pass it).
If leading a package of fighters overseas, you may be in a formation of other KC-10s, which takes the focused attention of the entire crew for most of the mission. You have to keep an eye on your fuel state as well as that of the fighters. In addition, you may need to take on gas yourself. You also have to constantly update your divert options if one of the fighters has a malfunction and needs to land as soon as possible. Such fighter drags can be quite fatiguing.
Unfortunately, the USAF frowns on watching movies while flying (at least it did when I was in). Acceptable activities were napping, completing mission paperwork, discussing aircraft systems with the crew, etc. Plus, the KC-10 back then only had 9-waypont INSs, so the crew seemed to be constantly feeding coordinates into the boxes - another detail that you didn’t want to dork up.
My dad told me of the bored pilot who idly asked on Guard, “Who dat?”
A pause, and someone else responded, “Who dat say ‘Who dat?’”
Someone else chimed in with, “Who dat say who dat say ‘Who dat?’”
ATC or some no-humor pilot snarled, “All right, you clowns, knock it off. You’re on Guard.”
A long pause, and then: “Who dat?”
Huh, and here I thought this thread was bumped because of today’s XKCD.