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A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

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Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#111

Post by Mountain_Skies »

nso wrote: post #37
dan-robertson wrote: post #30

It doesn’t sound particularly human and it seems like it would be a weird hobby to go on a bunch of flights and cause these strange sounds. Surely a prankster would get bored and move on to something like music or silly messages. (And if the airline believed passengers were doing it they might correlate flight records or something?) I think I’d probably believe that it’s just some elctromechanical issue. I doubt fixi…

We must be listening to different tapes. Sounds very much human, very much male, very much young

Sounds human to me too but I wonder if we've been primed by the headline to recognize it as such. If it had just been posted as "Mystery sound on American Airlines flights", maybe we would have interpreted it differently. This has worked on me before for backmasking and was quite remarkable how different what I heard between when I was primed and when I listened to the track a week later without priming.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#112

Post by z9znz »

ketanmaheshwari wrote: post #84

This could be an internal thing done as to arouse curiosity and attract passengers over the Halloween and the following holiday season.

Having annoying or disturbing loud human noises over the PA system for the entire flight is not something one does to "arouse curiousity".

There's no way this is a sanctioned AA marketing program.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#113

Post by _zzaw »

Nextgrid wrote: post #100
BbzzbB wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt courts would interpret "hacked into an airplane's communication system" as a silly prank, but I ANAL.

Plugging in a Bluetooth transmitter into a user-accessible port and using the system as intended is "hacking" now? Sure, passengers weren't intended to use that port, but from a system perspective the system is being used as intended with no interference or exploitation. I'm not sure this system can even be "hacked" short of disassembling parts of the plane and tapping into the communications wiring.

I think a case could be made that it's unauthorized access, since the prankster is definitely not supposed to be using the system for those purposes, regardless of how accessible it is. Same as if you walked into a bank or something and surreptitiously plugged a malicious USB drive into one of their machines.

Maybe it would make a difference if the prankster was an employee, and not just some random person, but I doubt it.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#114

Post by operator1 »

I know little about airplane tech, but do these onboard systems such as PA ever get OTA software updates? Perhaps an update got pushed that runs the prank? Could explain it happening on multiple flights and attendants being unable to stop it.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#117

Post by GekkePrutser »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #91
iudqnolq wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uninformed guess: "The master [public address system] power button [located] up by [seat] 1L kept getting pushed so it would shut off all the IFE [(inflight entertainment)]" This makes sense, because for safety reasons all the entertainment is paused when they use the public address system.

> for safety reasons all the entertainment is paused when they use the public address system. It's more common for the entertainment to be muted without being paused. I assume that's as a convenience to the passengers.

Yeah great convenience to miss part of the movie because they want to sell inflight shopping :P

I had totally forgotten about this because I haven't flown long-haul in decades. I suppose these days I would just watch video on my tablet anyway.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#118

Post by z9znz »

rthomas6 wrote: post #16

Maybe something in there is picking up the guard frequency. People make weird noises on that frequency all the time, including animal noises and screaming.

Is the guard freq available (to receive from) at flight altitude? At least one of the reports supposedly involved the entire flight time.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#119

Post by _zzaw »

dan-robertson wrote: post #30

It doesn’t sound particularly human and it seems like it would be a weird hobby to go on a bunch of flights and cause these strange sounds. Surely a prankster would get bored and move on to something like music or silly messages. (And if the airline believed passengers were doing it they might correlate flight records or something?) I think I’d probably believe that it’s just some elctromechanical issue. I doubt fixi…

There is no way this is mechanical or feedback-related. The sounds are just too varied. There's a point where the guy clearly says "raargh".

It's obviously someone messing around. I assume AA claimed it's a glitch because PR doesn't want stories going around about how their planes are hackable, but it just makes them sound untrustworthy.

Re: A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements

#120

Post by tzs »

cush wrote: post #115
phillipwei wrote: post #21

I wonder if AA has cross referenced the passenger list of each of the flights to see if there was a common passenger to all the flights.

Or perhaps all those flights took place on the same plane.

There are reports of it happening on both Airbus A321 and Boeing 737-800 planes.
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