281–290 of 301 posts
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Not on purpose, but there are YouTube videos of pilots accidentally doing in flight announcements on guard. Maybe there's some plane error that is sometimes causing the error the other way around.
I know Unites Airlines used to make its pilot’s atc communications available on “channel 11”, but I think that all stopped post 9/11.
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It reminds me of a story I just heard about the allegedly haunted plane parts from the crash of EA 401. Obviously not the most probable explanation, but I found the story interesting. https://mysteriesrunsolved.com/2020/07/ghosts-of-flight-401....
Jesus H. Christ, that brings back memories. When I was (much) younger, probably somewhere between 9-13 or thereabouts, I had a brief phase when I really in to "weird stuff." I spent a lot of time reading books about UFO's, ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle, the Philadelphia Experiment, "ancient aliens", the "Oak Island money pit", blah, etc. etc. And the whole Flight 401 thing either figured very prominently in at least o…
I would like to have that again, if only for a few moments.
I doubt the veracity of this account, at all. The liability from flying a malfunctioning, compromised plane is way too high for this to happen more than once.
Not an aviator, but planes can & do fly with malfunctioning noncritical components all the time. I don't know whether the PA system is considered critical or not, but it also didn't appear to be nonfunctional; the article said the pilots were able to use it & that their signal appeared to have a higher priority. I don't know if this is true or not either, but I don't think we can reject it on it's face.
Fortunately, planes are extremely robust and somehow Mexican airlines have an excellent safety record.
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In this article the author claims to have talked to American Airlines about it: >American Airlines inspected the Boeing 737-800 as well as the P.A. system itself after these reports. They tell me that maintenance “determined the sounds were caused by an issue with the PA amplifier. There was no external access to the system.” https://viewfromthewing.com/no-theres-no-ghost-in-the-machin...
> “determined the sounds were caused by an issue with the PA amplifier. There was no external access to the system.” Hard to agree. Those sounds are almost certainly a human voice, presumably digitized. Unless the issue with the PA amp is that someone connected a sample player to it. Former pro audio engineer here.
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There are Easter eggs in military avionics. The B-52H bomb/nav computers had a really rudimentary golf game. Think Atari 2600 quality. The B-2A had a breakout-like game at one time. Both were accessed via some really esoteric key presses.
Do you have a source? This seems very interesting, but I can’t find anything about it.
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I think you’re trying to decide if it’s a prank or not. And (I assume) you care about trying to come to conclusions that are likely correct. Therefore I think you should care about things that would lead you to incorrect conclusions. Suppose the two possibilities are ‘prank made from human’s voice’ and ‘weird electromechanical phenomenon’. The logic I believe you’ve implicitly applied is that most electromechanical p…
Your post is an example of forced rationality. You're ignoring the fact that it's not just one production. I would consider your position if there was one continuous production with small to no variations. Why are you ignoring the following? - the sounds have the length of a yell or a moan. - the silence between them is not fixed or related to any other sound that we can hear on the plane. - there are no artifacts, e…
In cabin medical audio jacks [2] are the likely explanation, but it would be easy to inspect those: https://i.stack.imgur.com/5w241.jpg * Unless someone had made dongle that once inserted looked like the same plugs, but raised enough to hide the dongle and match the color/texture of the surrounding plastic. The fake plugs on the outside would not even need to be functional and the device could be set to start on a de…
In cabin medical audio jacks [2] are the likely explanation, but it would be easy to inspect those: https://i.stack.imgur.com/5w241.jpg * Unless someone had made dongle that once inserted looked like the same plugs, but raised enough to hide the dongle and match the color/texture of the surrounding plastic. The fake plugs on the outside would not even need to be functional and the device could be set to start on a de…
This must be the explanation. The one thing I can't quite understand though is how someone could be simultaneously so very technically clever and yet execute such a mundane level of prank. This could be so much more epic if someone got more creative with the choice of audio track. I mean, it could be anywhere from totally hilarious to actual terrorism. Scary to think of the possibilities.
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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.
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Reminds me of when a security researcher discovered that, in addition to some serious security flaws, certain Siemens PLCs had monkeys hidden in their firmware: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/08/serio... According to the researcher who found it, "they didn’t think it was very funny.” I love easter eggs myself—classic Apple software in particular had a lot of these, and I really miss finding them—…
I looked up the story behind the "Bluets and Granola Bars" easter egg. Apparently, the System Error Handler, part of the boot ROM, used to display a popup that said "Welcome to Macintosh" at startup, before the operating system loaded. However, in System 7.6, this was replaced by a new splash screen with the Mac OS logo, and the old "Welcome to Macintosh" message in the system resource file was replaced with the Gran…