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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

#201

Damn that guy has an annoying voice.

Listen, pal, that's none other than protean blue checkmark Emerson Collins himself, well-known actor and producer of "Del Shores: Naked. Sordid. Reality" and "Southern Baptist Sissies". The voice you claim to be annoying is the instrument of a trained thespian.

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

#202
post #49
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad you brought that up because (no joke) nobody can actually explain how aerodynamic lift works, much less how a plane can fly upside down: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-can-explai...

Planes fly because of climate change. Which causes us to need more climate change as we get more flights. Sad but true.

pure science right there

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

#203
post #197
post #192

Interesting. I heard similar sounds from a rather big French train station speakers recently. For me it looks like it’s just a bug from the amplification system.

I feel like I'm going crazy when I read things like this. To me that is very clearly a human voice. Does it not sound that way to you?

Goats yell like humans and we seem to recognize the sounds as human voices, even when they're not. It's probably a bad example, but maybe we "recognize" human voices even when they're not there. Similar to how we recognize faces everywhere that aren't really faces (e.g. the face on the moon).

But anyway, I'm playing devil's advocate with myself. I agree that's definitely a human voice on the intercom.

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

#204
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently there is a compact flash card to play music and the pre-recorded announcement over the loud speakers. I wonder if someone replaced the standard announcement with a 5 hour long file with intermittent burps and groans....

They would probably notice that but it does seem like some former passenger most likely installed something that's patched into the system. It may just be a recording from a flash drive. Or it could also be more sophisticated and patch into the wifi as well. You could also imagine it having a microphone for added hijinx but none of the interactions seem to suggest that.

If it were just one passenger it would be easy to find out who she is by cross checking passenger lists. So probably not. Maybe a coordinated 4chan-style prank.

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

#205
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Age, probably. Young kids aren't that smart.

A lot of what I am complaining about is actually people older than me peddling "advise" - how to become a data analyst (no understanding of data required!). It just feels like Facebook-tier people given the content equivalent of a machine gun.

> how to become a data analyst (no understanding of data required!)

That sounds plenty plausible to me.

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

#206
post #6

For those interested in the various aircraft systems for PA (public address) and aircraft status system for aircrew, I found this interesting training doc PDF online [1] for the A320/321. I have been looking at section "03-010 CABIN INTERCOMMUNICATION DATA SYSTEM" It does not mention the "medical intercom jacks" in overhead bins that are mentioned at the end of the article [1]: https://caisatech.net/uploads/XXI_3_AIR…

A bit of searching for airplane medical communications jacks turned up this picture: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/12776/how-are-t... Jacking into that would not be inconspicuous.

If those are 1/4" or 6.35mm audio phone jacks, I'm sure there are lots of electrical engineers who could design a pre-recorded player that would fit ENTIRELY inside the jack without protruding outside the jack whatsoever.

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

#208
If it’s this widespread then it either has to be AA maintenance (perhaps a team having a bit of reputational mutiny because AA management pockets tons of cash and exploits cheap contractors and constantly bitches about pilot pay but wouldn’t fly planes without pilots) or it’s remote.

As an audio person, musician, producer blah blah, that is totally human. Likely recorded and filtered a few times. By the inflections I think Eastern European. The sound of it reminds me of a Slavic based vocal upbringing. Doesn’t seem like North Korean, Latin, or North American to me.

Probably about a couple minutes of audio looping somehow at the source. Far too many for it to be a hardware exploit because honestly who wants to invest that much in this kind of prank? This isn’t Zug Super Bowl level[0].

My guess is they’re coming through the least secure provider for a third party service - probably the WiFi enterprise thru being on the inside of them - and AA is their first playground where people are noticing. How they get from there to the intercom is probably buried deep in a couple audio wires plugged into overlapping sources unintentionally or there is some kind of frequency band that isn’t shielded properly so it’s possible to push the audio signal over something else and cause garbled noise and almost impossible to find.

Like, in the past it was funny when picking up FM radio signals through my guitar amp, but it sucked when trying to have a serious jam session and talk between playing. Audio signals can be really powerful compared to other delicate systems IMO.

Definitely curious and want to see how this unfolds!

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zug_(website)

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

#209

This reminded me of something that happened to me in college. This is a unlikely sounding story, but I swear it's the truth. I started noticing some odd sounds in the Student Union building. One day I had some time and decided to investigate. I realized it was coming from a fire alarm. I stood under the alarm and listened for a while. The alarm was quietly whistling "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" by Daft Punk.

I have a similar kind of fun story. The emergency phone on the elevator at work had a phone number somewhat close to that of an appliance store. People would call the number, the elevator phone would immediately put them on speaker phone. I figured this out one time I heard a faint phone breathing sound, and I started speaking with the caller. This happened again about once a year, and I had a fun time explaining to the callers that not only did they have the wrong number, but they had reached an elevator emergency phone. This response always caused a great deal of confusion.

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would probably notice that but it does seem like some former passenger most likely installed something that's patched into the system. It may just be a recording from a flash drive. Or it could also be more sophisticated and patch into the wifi as well. You could also imagine it having a microphone for added hijinx but none of the interactions seem to suggest that.

I've flown American six times in the last ten days, and four of the flights had chaos with the entertainment system. No groans or heavy breathing on the PA, but flight attendants had to "reboot the system" once or twice every flight.

They might be doing that out of caution just to keep it from being exploited. Sounds like something management or the Flight Crew might decide is a band aid if one tries it and it works then everybody starts doing it. Knee jerk reaction but sounds like they’re stumped.
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