Revisionist HistoryWhat does a pilot sound like? Malcolm and Ben Naddaff-Hafrey take off on a long, strange investigation that takes them from Las Vegas to Family Guy to the airspace over the Mojave desert and the cold waters of the Hudson river.
Pushkin.
A few weeks ago, when the leaves had just started to turn up here in Hudson, one of our revisionist history producers, Ben the DAPFH. Haffrey, came by the offices of Pushkin North in the grand tradition of revisionist history. He had recently been flying around the country working on a story when an unexpected encounter got him thinking about something entirely different.
I had a really unlucky day of travel a couple of weeks ago. I was in San Francisco and I was trying to get to Los Angeles. But I had to rebook my flight because of an urgent work meeting that got moved. And when I got to the airport, I realized I'd rebooked it two weeks after I was trying to fly and I was trying to save money. I got the cheapest ticket possible, so I could not change the flight, and so I just had to rebook on the chief flight I could find, which was a Southwest flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles via Las Vegas, which makes no sense, absolutely no sense. So then I got on the air train going the wrong way. I wound up in this like median strip of the highway that was coming from a wedding, and my suit bag broke, my suit was flying all over the place, and just a bad luck day. But you know, I made the flight, wound up in Vegas and I had all these slot machines in the airport, just a dreadful airport. As you've recently pointed out, this was my first time in Vegas, and I had exactly one dollar in my pocket, and I thought, you know, my luck has been so bad, surely it's time for it to change. And so, having never played a slot machine before, I put the dollar in this like kung fu slot machine and just promptly lost it. Just lost my dollar entirely. Okay, So to feed I got on my flight on Southwest where they let you choose your seat. So I was just walking resignably down the aisle and then I see an open seat next to an off duty pilot, which suddenly made me think that my luck was changing, because I was like, here is a chance for me to finally ask a question that I have for a very long time been obsessed with answering. Yeah, why do all pilots have the same voice?
Welcome to revisionist history, my show about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. Today's episode is a conversation with Ben daf Haffrey, digging into whether and why all pilots sound the same and what that might tell us about aviation and human nature.
All Right, so I'm on this unnecessary flight from Vegas, Los Angeles, saying next to an nof duty pilot who I had later learned was named Rob.
Wait, how do you How do you know he's a pilot?
So you know he's a pilot because he's got like the apolets on his shoulder, the stripes YE short sleep button on shirt, and also a lanyard that said like Pilot's Association or something like that. Yeah, you could, you could tell immediately. So I see my golden opportunity. And I asked Rob about pilot voice. Do you have a sense that all people think pilots have the same voice.
I definitely have a sense that there's a idea that we kind of make certain noises on the intercom.
Jack Butt, it's this, I guess. My My first question to you is do you do you share this sense? If I were to ask you, what does a pilot sound like? Is there a voice in your mind.
I mean, it's the it's the the analogy is to you know, in medicine, it's bedside manner, and what is bedside manner? A lot of bedside manner is just the the way in which the doctor addresses you.
But there's not I don't feel like there is a doctor's voice in the same way as there is a pilot's voice. No, no, Like I think there's a cultural understanding of what a pilot sounds like that doesn't exist for hardly any other social role. I mean, so I was thinking about this. You have all these pilots in the media, like Quagmire on Family Guy.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
This is your captain, Glenn Quagmire.
We're looking about a four and a half hour flight time today.
Giggity Man Damon on thirty rock Well Deck.
It looks like it's gonna be about another half hour and then we'll be.
On our way.
Yeah.
So the U sound is a universal component of pilot voice.
Yeah. Universal. And I mean this is the thing I talked about with Rob Like he does OZ all the time. Okay, so where does that come from? I think there's some truth to it.
I mean obviously sucks, completely true. But yeah, we're up there, we're multitasking, and we get we get a little busy, and we're trying to make an announcement, and uh, you know, sometimes you don't really think about completely what you're gonna say, you know, the basics, but your brain still put it together, you know, so just human nature. You know, your brain's taking a pause.
And in fact, he even copped to the fact that sometimes he does an extra long uh like he will actually draw out not all right.
I have a couple of times, not often, but I have kind of drawn that out on purpose whatever you would call that sound, just for fun, you know. But like you said earlier, I have no idea if anybody in the in the back laughed or even picked up what I was throwing down.
You think you've like, actually done an extra long uh ridiculously long. But it's just enough to what's like an average lane maybe something.
But you have to do it a little bit of a lower tone than that, though, you know, well, I just like it's gotta have that lower lower tone.
Oh God, rob Is, God, said rob Is. I.
It has such a bad day. And then I sat next to Rob and I was like, I am, I am being blessed right now. And I got off the plane and I swear to God. When I was at the baggage claim, I walked by these two people who were talking in LA and one of them was saying to the other person like, well, you know the ancient notion of the wheel at fortune, right, And the guy was like, no, what's that. He's like, well, it's like Fortune's a wheel, so you have like your bad luck and then it comes around to good luck. I swear to God, I was like, what is good? You like die in Las Vegas? And then like this is just purgatory is bouncing between these two airports. But then when I landed in Los Angeles, I was like, I should actually figure out if it's just me having watched too many movies and not flown in enough planes, and talk to some people and see what they say. What does a pilot sound like? What does a pilot sound like? Yeah? Like is there a pilot's voice? Yes, in robotic, but it's usually for an impersonation.
Oh you're gonna do it it im you.
Sorry lady and Gemen, please fasten your seatbelts and apologize for the rough air, but we should be through it here in about ten minutes or so. Then you got to drag.
Them out like awe, we should be right about ten minutes or so.
All the time is seven o'clock.
All this when you're when you're the pilot's worse. She was right, it's like robotic.
So typically they sound the same.
I don't know how or why.
Is it just they've heard other pilots do it and they feel this is how I've got to talk.
What I'm wondering is like, do all pilots sound the same? Yes? They do? They do?
They always say, folks, folks.
Yes, I think in general, yes, they have like the same type of time, and they're all like pretty polished like whenever they come on like on like on the planet, like banacom or whatever.
They all sound the same. What does a pilot sound like.
Like a robot?
Do you think all pilots sound the same.
Yes, except for the black ones.
Except for the ones? Interesting? What did I sound like lang? And the rest sound like yo people? Yeah?
Wit a minute, you know about what Tom Wolfe says about this and the right stuff. It's yaeger, It's all chuck yeger.
Yeah, racking the sound barrier, and the X one marked another milestone in eight ah in History, Good Time, October fourteenth, nineteen forty seven, No Pilots Captain Chuck Yeger.
Chuck Yeger, the famous test pilot from West Virginia who in nineteen forty seven breaks the sound barrier.
The X one was mine because I was trained in maintenance and I understood systems, and obviously he could fly an airplane.
So Yeah, Tom Wolf writes The Right Stuff nineteen seventy nine. Later it becomes a big movie, and he identifies this phenomenon that all pilots sound the same and specifically attributes it to sounding like Chuck Yeger.
And in The Right Stuff, there's that moment where Yeah Go, played by Sam Shefferd, says when he's dismissing astronauts, they're spaming a can.
And it's pilot voice.
Tell you what else.
Anybody goes up and the damn thing is gonna be spam in a can.
That actually brought the passage from the Right Stuff if you want to read.
It, Okay, here goes Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot coming over the intercom with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself. The voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seatbelts because it might get a little choppy. Who doesn't know that voice, and who can forget it even after he has proved right and the emergency is over. That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appellationian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that as the saying went, they had to pipe in daylight. In the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties, this up hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down down, down, from the upper reaches of their brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then soon airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas in Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as it could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.
Chucky there.
Tomolf is so just amazing, it's so good. He's just it's just like it's Tumolf is just the best.
Yeah, and I like that. He's just you know, he was not in airports asking everybody if they agreed that all pilots sounded this way. He was just like, yeah, I got it. But I don't actually think that's a sufficient explanation for what pilot voice is, partially because like, when was the last time you you listened to Chuck Yeger.
I don't think I ever have.
I know, Sam Sheppard, it's not the pilot voice I'm getting. I believe there's some essential Jaeger nests that is preserved in the pilot's voice, but it's not like a note for note replication of that thing.
You I'm as interested in a word choice. So folks, is clearly huge.
There's a Someone at LAX also pointed this out specifically.
What are other vocabulary choices that are central to pilot voice?
Well, I think the euphemisms are huge. So the near miss, bumpier, choppier.
Diminutives a little bit of turbulent, It got a little bit of Yep, it's not lackadaisical, but it is. They want to They do want to signal that these problems are so trivial that they can barely muster, you know, normal levels of enthusiasm to It's just everything's just kind of I've seen it all before, kind of yeah, there's a Can I do a little thing about the evolutionary basis for a pilot voice? So stress, one of the things that stress does is raise your voice, right, So one of the signatures of someone who is under a great deal of stress or experiencing a high anxiety moment is their voice rises in is it pitch?
It's also probably like I bet your vocal cords titan, and then you become less resonant. Yes, So I would suspect there's.
And so we're conditioned evolutionarily to interpret somebody with a kind of a high, fast speech cadence as being terrified. So the pilot necessarily has to be the person who speaks slowly and low if he's trying to communicate calm.
You think you think people are you're you think people are making hires based in part on whether or not you have the right pilot voice.
We already know that in every other job, some aspect of physical presentation matters hugely and who gets who gets hired or not right, So when it comes to hiring pilots, you would be if you're the hiring person even unconsciously powerfully disposed to hire someone who who conformed to pilot stereotype. I mean, look at the way that there was a whole separate set of things for years that governed what a stewards was supposed to be, a flood atten was supposed to be.
Right, It was right down.
They would like measure their They would do body measurements of women who are trying to be flight attends, and the you had to look a certain way, have a certain shape, you know, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. We don't think that applies to pilots, the one actually flying the plane.
Well, like a lot of the pilot voice thing. The first thing people say is is just the speakers, And the second thing people say is is because they're all white guys.
Yeah, the most hierarchical institutions in our society are still all dominated by white guys, particularly tall, tall, middle aged white guys. That's what CEOs are, That's what pilots are, that's what neurosurgeons are, that's what you know presidents are.
That's what I make it go on.
It's like, yeah, the same stereotyping and bias is applied in piloting, and it is statistically true, like about ninety five percent of pilots are white and about ninety five percent of pilots are male, at least as of twenty twenty two numbers. That is changing, but historically it has always been a very white male profession and it continues to be so. But like, not every white guy sounds the same. And similarly, a lot of pilots were in the Air Force, but not every veteran sounds the same. So this has some explanatory force, but not total explanatory force. There's still some weird extra kind of convergence happening even within this group. So this is where I think this all leaves us there is an idea at least that there is a pilot voice. Tom Wolfe says it's Jeger, But I really don't think it's enough to say that all pilots are imitating Chuck Yeger. I mean, it is clear to me that there's an attitude of Jaeger that has been preserved, but it's not really his voice. And I mean, Rob had not even heard Chuck Jaeger.
I certainly don't know what his voice sounded like. I can't, I can't think of it.
Yeah, I.
Don't think it was anything that I.
Consciously was doing.
But I think you've got me thinking maybe I dropped my voice down a pitch. I think, yeah, I.
Think I do.
They even realizing, So something's up. It's not just Chuck Yegger. What I'm interested in is what does that voice represent and how did it happen that they all sound alike.
We'll be right back. Can do another analogy here, believe.
So.
I was thinking about this as you're talking, which is there's a whole literature on contrition in the cases of accused criminals. So you're in court, you're making your statement, or you're talking and jury's listening. One of the things that jury's way that heaviest is whether or not they feel like the accused is displaying contrition. Right, they have an expectator, there's an expectation about a certain mode of self presentation. Now, no one really knows what contrition looks like. Is there actually isn't you know? We know what happiness looks like, we know what anxiety looks like, we know what anger looks like. We don't really know what contrition looks like. All we know is that contrition is really, really, really important, and in its absence, juries deliver much harsher penalties, much more likely to call you guilty, or the judge is much more I could give you a long sentence. So there's a kind of this is there's a feedback loop between the party that's giving a presentation and the part is listening, And I wonder what the pilot is expected to communicate is competence and reassurance right now? Do we have a formal definition of what those things are? Not really known, not any more than we do for contrition. But that doesn't mean that we don't spend a huge amount of time communicating it. And we kind of know it when we you know, this is a vague thing that we know of when we see it. People certainly can say he did not you hear all the time Jerry's saying.
It did not seem right? Contrite right? Anyway.
This is all like a long way of saying, is there is this? Like I would just I agree with everything I say, I would just say I would add this that it's a loop with the audience expectation.
Well, so there are these clear ingredients in the pilot voice as it's used by pilots and expected by passengers. You got the drawn out as, the slow pace, maybe a bit of southern drawl. But I want to get into the mechanisms by which a whole profession could converge on a specific voice. So I talked to this speech psychologist, Jennifer S. Pardo, who's the director of the Speech Communication Laboratory at Montclair State University, you know, called her up, said I want to talk to you about pilot voice, every hear of it.
I actually asked my husband about it yesterday. He used to actually do flight training for a while, just you know, as a hobby, and he said, oh, yeah, there's definitely, definitely pilot voice. Well he and he's like, oh, yeah, it's totally from Chuck ye Europe. Yeah, he definitely felt like there was I wouldn't say pressure, but he definitely felt the need to get into this mode of speaking when he was in flight training to you know, to show that he was.
Part of the group here.
I was like, really, why did you never tell me this?
So Jen specifically works on something called phonetic convergence and also communication accommodation theory, which is basically it's this, it's a theoretical frame for a thing that most of us experienced. Like you go to London as an American, You're there for two weeks, and by the end of the two weeks, you start maybe there's some British mannerisms work their way out of your speech. Communication accommodation and is the study of the way what the mechanism of that is how you sort of modify your way of speaking to belong to an in group or to distinguish yourself from an out group. And for pilots, it's something that could be happening basically unwinningly because of how much else they're doing in the cockpit.
So research and phonetic convergence is trying to really pinpoint some of these internal cognitive mechanisms and how they play around with each other. And this idea of cognitive load and multitasking. Right, if it's an automatic process, it's something that would be harder to suppress when you're multitasking.
Jen studies this. So she actually looked at like roommates who live together in college and do their does the way they speak converge over the course of a semester, which often it does. But she said an interesting thing, which is we tend to think of communication as a one way thing, like broadcasting functionally, but it is it is a two way thing. So half of it is how you're communicating. Half of it is how you're being perceived.
Like if you really were to look at it, like really really look at it, like take you know, take a recording, compare the recording right to other recordings, put it in a scientific setting in a scientific experiment, you'd probably find more differences than similarities, but the similarities matter maybe more. Right, So there is this other thing going on where socially or psychologically, because we believe it to be true, we look for evidence that it's true every time we hear it. And if we don't get the evidence from one aspect of the way the person is talking, we might see it in another aspect of the way that the person is talking. Right. If it's not there in the vocabulary, it might be there in something about the sentence structure, or it might just be that they all went up right. It could just be one little thing that they're all doing and we're like, Okay, they did it right, they did the thing.
I do think that is a crucial element to the pilot voice thing. Of course, it's not true that all pilots have exactly the same voice, But insofar as the majority of people I've spoken to, most people you come across on the street, if you asked them this question, what does a pilot sound like, have the same voice in their mind? Some of that is just projection, And I think it's projection from a place of needing security, having the question in the back of your mind of your pilot, that Tom Wolfe question, do they have the right stuff? Yeah? And so there is that kind of that's that's part of this projection thing you're referring to as well, like the expectation thing. But It's interesting because you see and interact with flight attendants, but you typically do not see the pilot until the plane has safely landed, So the only point of contact you have with your pilot until then is the voice. Yeah, which they're also aware of. And also it's this, it's this crazy situation of they are speaking the several hundred people, all of whom have some kind of background anxiety about flying, which is, you know, in my opinion, just a completely unnatural thing to do. Like we were not given wings for a reason, So you're rocketing through the air in this metal tube and human error is the number one cause of plane accidents. So you only have the pilot's voice as a way of judging how competent this person is at their actual job, which is something they also are aware of. I actually talked to a captain who named Karen, who's been flying for a few decades, and she was perfect for this because, in addition to being a captain, she teaches that something called the Fear of Flying Clinic, which is ironic because.
My last name is not a great pilot thing, so.
You want to my last name is Stall, And even though there's an age in it, it sounds the exact same, so people will hear. So I never say this is Captain Stall. I always say this is the captain speaking. But I always break that up just so that if there is someone back there who's feeling the you know, nervous about flying.
Can be like, Okay, that's a sign I gotta get out of here.
Captain Stall. Yeah, that's that's really unfortunate.
I met. It's hilarious.
Captain Stall airline pilot, also an expert on why people are terrified of flying, something she can empathize with because she herself really dislikes public speaking. Can I ask when you were starting did you feel when you made your first PA's okay, I know what a pilot's supposed to sound like, and how do I do my version of the voice or how conscious were you of this thing?
Oh?
I was terrified because I would imagine everybody's listening tuned in and going, oh my gosh, who is that?
And her voice doesn't sound like what I'm expecting up there?
And also not even just that, I just wasn't comfortable with a microphone in my hand, So I guarantee you my voice was not reassuring when I was making my first feel because I was too nervous.
I was very.
Comfortable with the flying part, but not with them making. I would also say, it's always the male that you hear as a pilot voice when when somebody's talking about the pilot voice. So that's one thing about, you know, being a woman in this job is trying to get that voice out there for the girls and for them, for the boys, for just people in general, to know it's not all just guys flying.
The point, you know, she has a great voice, doesn't she She does have a great voice. She's funny too, though. I wonder what I wonder is what, like, do we like the fact that she seems to have a little bit of a sense of humor.
I think we do.
Yeah, I feel like there is a certain kind of humor that's not trying to make you laugh, but it shows that the person finds the situation amusing. It's like more a reflection of the fact that they're kind of amused by everything than that they're you know, trying to be a median or something. You just you want somebody. You want somebody who's got like a pretty upbeat view of the world and is unhary.
Yeah, that's right, Yeah, she has that. That is that kind of one eyebrows slightly raised.
Yeah, like she gets what's funny about her name, for instance. But where it leads me is it does seem like there's an awareness in pilots that you have to communicate competence. Sound like a pilot because you're answerable to the people on the back who don't have any other way of telling if you're doing a good job, like they don't know at all what it means to fly the plane, right, yeah.
Yeah.
And then in terms of conveying to people, one thing that I have found it's very helpful for people to hear your voice when there is tribulence, because people just want to hear your voice and then they can go like, oh okod. So for me, it's just trying to be.
Natural and comfortable and making pas that are reassuring to people.
That's the goal.
It's going to be.
More what the message is and the tone of voice so that it's not something that's going to make somebody fearful, just in the fact that if my voice sounded fear inducing in some way.
But then the question I had after Gen Pardo and Captain Stall is how are all these pilots arriving at essentially the same answer for how to convey these basic assurances with their voice. And I talked to a pilot who said that everything in flying is either technique or procedure, and that most of flying is procedure, including you know, when you're descending you call out the altitude at certain points, or when you put the gear down, you say gear down. It's like you say a specific thing at a certain moment. That's procedure. Technique is things like we have to lose altitude. There's a number of ways a pilot could do that. But also it's communicating with your passengers. There is no script or set of things that you have to do when communicating with the passengers. For some things, they are guidelines or samples of what you might say, but it's not so strictly prescribed as other parts of flying are. So part of what I think is going on here is these are intensely rule bound people who are used to following standard operating procedure and nearly everything that they do. They know it's a really high stakes job. They know that communicating with the passengers is a really high stakes thing. And so when they speak to the passengers. It's like it's procedure masquerading as technique and they're actually in their minds like reaching for what does a pilot sound like? What does a pilot say? This sort of thing that's totally unnecessary. But he is a kind of competence theater.
So why is Tom Cruise allowed to break all the pilot rules?
Why is Maverick allowed to.
In general, the Tom Cruise even a mission impossible? You know, he instead of playing the kind of cool, calm, unflappable, he's always sprinting madly from one thing to the next. And like, but it's a persona that he brings to one movie after another, including his pilot roles, where he gets to deviate from what we normally. He's a hero who gets to he's essentially a jackass in these movies.
Well, Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise. I mean, like that's the part of it is, like you just know it's him in every role, and there is this kind of I remember there's there's one I forget what movie they were reviewing. I think it was a New York Times review of a Tom Cruise movie. It's like, this has nothing to do with the Pilot thing. But so much of the cultural narrative around him right now is he's the last movie star. Like he cares so much about movies. He's going to do all his own stunts and get us to come back to the theater just by his charisma, because he has that thing that we've lost from our culture in all of this, you know, Marvel movie mayhem. But the fact is Tom Cruise used to be really charming, like it used to be in the eighties. I feel like eighties and nineties Cruise was really charming on screen. And now he is functional. He just a Marvel movie but in human form, Like he does the Marvel thing, but just with his own body as opposed to with VFX. He just is kind of an impressive athlete.
Well he's but this this does tell you what we're talking about because his part of a key part of his persona is visible effort, yes, right, whereas what we want pilot voice is about invisible effort.
No.
Yes, the pilot never lets on that he is. He never says, folks, you know we got a we got an intense next ten minutes. I'm not going to talk to you because I'm gonna be so overwhelmed with what I'm doing. But we're gonna we're gonna try really hard and I'm sick. We're gonna pull this out like gotta go. Like Tom Cruise essentially is saying, can't talk now, gotta go. You got to solve this problem, like all right, I'm talking about it, you know, Whereas like that's the antithesis. It's only he's allowed to do that. Everyone else has got to do pilot.
I think that's true. And also I think this is part of what's going on with the UH. Yeah, the UH. One explanation for it is they get all the information that they're reading out to the passengers, all the unnecessary information nobody cares about, like, oh, that's like too many knots. I wish there were fewer knots. And when the New York City like it, they are translating it in some cases from whatever code it's in, and they're thinking, and they don't want to let they don't want to let dead air happen, so they just stretch out the UH. So the UH is when some sort of mental effort is taking place but it's not being disclosed.
Why you assume the AH was just a deliberate affectation to suggest that they are in no hurry.
I think that's what it is. But it also fills space when they are doing something else. Yeah, so it's it's yeah, yeah, So I think there is there's a few things going on to the UH. I think a lot of it is this communication accommodation theory thing. It's like that is you're doing with your voice. I am part of an in group, and you notice, I mean a lot of people I asked about the pilot voice thing, They're like, well, it's just the speakers. It's the it's the phones and headsets and the speakers. I don't think it is true that that thins out the voice. But everyone you hear on a plane is speaking through the same speaker, the same technology, and they don't all sound the same. So I think there's a kind of like the pilot also, only with their voice. It's like vocal Epaulett's like they've got to show with their voice that they are not other crew members. And then it's us also, you know, orally auditioning them of like can you can you fly this thing?
Yeah?
I've got a few more questions, but let's take a short break. Then and then we'll be right back. Okay, we're back.
I do. There's there's one other thing that's interesting to me. Are you familiar with the sterile Cockpit Rule gone. This is a regulation that came about after a famous crash in nineteen seventy four. This is actually this is the plane that Stephen Colbert's father and two of his brothers were on when it crashed.
Wow.
And when the regulators reviewed the fight records, listened to the block box. One of the things they concluded is that they were the crew was distracted by conversation and specifically by small talk. I think the line is something like on everything from used cars to politics. And this was one of a series of accidents that had happened in this way, and so in response to this, the FAA created a rule or a set of rules called that are colloquially known as the sterial Cockpit Rule, which is just about what it takes to create a distraction free environment in the cockpit during crucial moments of flight. To this day, most of the violations of the Sterile Cockpit Rule are conversation. So there's like, like, this is what citation. This very senior captain was about to leave on a scuba diving trip and talked NonStop to his female jump seat writer upon discovering she was also a diver. This altitude deviation could have been prevented entirely if this particular captain had paid attention to his job and observed some approximation of the sterile cockpit below ten thousand feet. This, I think feeds into the technique versus precedure thing of if you are a pilot, you are aware that, even though what you say to the passengers is not scripted and rule bound, your communication is an incredibly high stakes thing, which I think is another factor in why you might sort of subconsciously reach for a cultural script about how you should sound and what you should say. And it's partially because you know this is your captain speaking, so much of the voice is about projecting authority over this mini society in the air.
Yeah, and made even more pronounced by the fact that post nine to eleven, now the pilot's not allowed to leave the cockpit. So pre nine eleven you saw the pilot. He was often standing by the door when you came in, and he was most definitely there when you left, and sometimes one of them would come back. I remember they would come back mid flight say hello, you know all around. Oh yeah, I mean so he was, but he was still he was very much he's he's in he's he's also in character.
In those moments.
You know, he's in that uniform, the and he's he's dispensing the same kind of aw shucks, reassurance and wisdom. But the disabodied voice is a really modern it's the last twenty years.
That's really interesting that. I mean, that would suggest that there's more pressure. Theoretically there would be an increase in pilot voice. Yeah, that you in the last twenty years, or.
At least you would explain persistence of pilot voice.
Right, even as it becomes a more diverse profession, Right.
It's it persists because it's all it got, right.
Yeah, I mean I wonder if I mean, it's it's kind it's a crazy time to be flying right now, Like the past summer was one of like a historically bad time to fly. There's all this nutty weather, there's all these delays. There was the New York Times investigation that showed near misses are happening way more often than anyone thinks. And then a Washington Post investigation like a week later that said, thousands of pilots are claiming disabilities to the VA that if they were disclosed to the FAA, would make them unfit to fly. So it feels very much like like flying is a is a house of cards. Right now, it's it's a it's it's not it's not dangerous. It is not actually dangerous to fly. It's statistically quite safe to fly. But it is a highly pressurized moment in flight, which is why I think it's kind of an interesting time to think about the pilot's voice thing, Like there's a lot of pressure on that voice right now. There's also a really big pilot shortage, and then there's also the rise of AI. Simultaneously, there are companies that are basically trying to replace pilots. And I was reading this NASA presentation, but that was like that raised the question of whether we should automate pilots because human error is once again the number one cause of flight accidents. And what he concluded was pilots may cause problems, but they also, through their human ingenuity and their ability to basically have the right stuff, can fix problems too. And like a lot of flying is already on autopilot. So when you really need a pilot is when something unexpected happens, when your luck changes and something goes totally wrong, which you know, brings me to the last thing I want to play you today, which is have you ever listened to the flight deck audio of the Miracle on the Hudson of Sully.
Communicating, No, no, I never have.
It's not him communicating to his passengers, but it is him communicating from the flight deck. This was the famous emergency landing in two thousand and nine when Captain Sully Sellenberger landed his Airbus A three twenty in the Hudson River after some birds got caught in the engines. And to me, it illustrates the ideal that I think the pilot voice isn't its essence conveying not a Chuck Jaeger impression or some classic male stereotype, but a human ideal about our ability to solve even the hardest problems under the greatest stress.
This is OKAYCT just fifteen thirty nine hit first to FoST through us and both returning back towards LaGuardia.
Okay, yeah, you need to return the ol body turn left, heading up a too too zero two two zero, stopping the poker.
He's got emergency returning. It was a fifteen point nine of the bird strike.
He lost all engines. He lost the thrust in the engines. He's returning immediately back to fifteen.
To twenty nine witch engines.
He lost thrusts in both engines.
He said, you got it back is fifteen twenty nine. If we can get it. See do you want to try to land one on one's right?
Really well, we may end up in hutches.
I kat is fifteen point nine. It can be left traffic runway three one.
Notable that the unable fantastic is that is like that is I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that is the robot voice. That's one hundred two thousand one of the space obyssely unable.
What's the word to our right anything in New Jersey?
Maybe Peterborough?
Okay, yeah, if your right side, it's Peterborough Airport. Do you want to try to go to Teeterborough?
Yes, Peterborough pampire. Actually, look why the parks guy emergency in them? Hey guys, Jack is fifteen twenty nine over the George watch him Bridge wants to go to the airport right now.
Won't show out a pro check.
Does you need assistance? Yes?
Yeah, it was a birch. Can I get him in for runway one?
One way?
One?
That's good, Katy is fifteen twenty nine, turn right two way too, I can land. Run one is Peterborough. We can't do it, Okay, which one way?
Would you like? A Teeterborough? I'm sorry, say again, cats, We're gonna be in the Hudson.
So awesome.
It is incredible, unable.
The unable, the unable is my favorite unable.
And just in case any listeners aren't familiar, the end of all this is that Sully Lance's plane in the Hudson with no fatalities. So it's an incredible artifact and I think it takes us back to where we started today. You might get unlucky, misbook your flight, rip your suit bag, lose your money in Vegas, get a bird in your plane engines, But if all else fails in this crazy over attack system we're stuck with right now, you could still get lucky with the right person flying the plane, no matter what their voice sounds like.
The one thing I couldn't stop thinking about Ben throughout this whole episode is whether you have a good pilot's voice.
Well, yeah, someone in the airport said she thought that asked her was a pilot's sound like? She was like, you sound like a pilot, And I really don't think that I do. But do you think you have a good pilots for us?
Do I think I do? I do too much, too many volume shifts. Yeah, so it's not I need my hands as well to communicate properly. There's all kinds of reasons I think I would fail as a pilot, those being a principle with.
Yeah, I think I would chiefly fail at flying a plane.
By one, I flew a plane only once, and my you know, in the presence of an experienced co pilot, and my co pilot was a was a rabbi who flies on the side. And I have to say, the only thing more reassuring than a kind of Chuck yeger person next to you is a rabbi because he comes from a tradition of intellectual rigor, and you feel like if there is something to something obscure that.
He would need to know about the plane, you feel like he would know that.
This is like the Talmudic theory of flying. It's it's the technique procedure thing again.
He's Rashi said this about you know, flying in bad conditions.
He knows that that's amazing.
All right, well, thanks for this welcome all right, Ben, oh, I have one last bit of rob to play it sound any any any pilot voices sign offs?
Oh well, folks would like to thank you for flying with what's it?
Authentic history?
Revision is history. I will see you next time.
Yes, thanks so much.
I'll perspective, folks.
This episode for Vision's History.
Was produced by Ben and daff Haffrey, Jacob Smith and Taliamma, editing by Sarah Nix, original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Jake Krsky, and engineering by our very own Neil Lawrence.
Special thanks to Richard does E Smith.
Folks, I'm your captain, alcol grapl mm hmmmm
