A blog post by the “Airline Biz Blog” at the Dallas Morning News illustrates the complete ignorance of the news media when it comes to airline topics:

“I’m not a pilot so take it all with the usual caveats, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how two extremely seasoned professional pilots managed to “not hear” or “drown out” repeated voice messaging and made no radio calls… FOR SEVENTY-EIGHT MINUTES.My gut is with Fallows: The guys were asleep. It’s the only logical explanation and the laptop thing doesn’t fly with me. Pilots have strong opinions about just about everything (which is why we want them in the cockpit taking action) but I can’t see the vagaries of crew scheduling so deeply entrancing these guys for nearly 1 hour and twenty minutes.”

First things first.  The reporter is agreeing with James Fallows, a private pilot, and reporter for The Atlantic, not a professional pilot.  Perhaps a more credible source would lead to better reporting.

Is it really that hard to believe that two people can get so engrossed in a subject as to drown out the noise around them?  I was having a simple conversation with my fellow pilot in the flight deck and we flew 100 miles beyond the range of the controller we were listening to.  We weren’t sure if it was our fault or theirs, but it took several minutes to find a frequency and re-establish contact.

Once you fly beyond the transmitter range of a controller, you cannot hear the controller anymore, but you can hear other aircraft talking to them.  Airline pilots often tune out anything that does not start with their call-sign, so if you don’t hear your call-sign you often don’t listen to the transmission.

Listen in to any center control frequency on any day and you will find hundreds of instances of controllers having to repeatedly call aircraft for a response.  Many large aircraft do not have an intercom system between the pilots, so while at cruise they use the overhead speaker and take off their headsets to make conversation easier.  This has the effect of making the radio into background noise.

I can easily see how 2 pilots engaged in a spirited conversation and using their computers could miss radio traffic.

Finally, crew scheduling is the most heated topic of any airline flight deck.  Airline crews have an almost universal disgust with scheduling, and it leads to conversations well over 78 minutes.

Original post: http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/10/78-minutes-of-radio-silence-on.html