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SPEAKER_18: A few weeks ago, when the leaves had just started to turn up here in Hudson, one of our Revisionist History producers, Ben Nadaf-Haffrey, came by the offices of Pushkin North. In the grand tradition of Revisionist History, he'd recently been flying around the country working on a story when an unexpected encounter got him thinking about something entirely different.
SPEAKER_20: I had a really unlucky day of travel a couple 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 cheapest flight I could find, which was a Southwest flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles via Las Vegas, which makes no sense. No sense. Absolutely no sense. 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 and 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 they 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 $1 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. So defeated, 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.
SPEAKER_20: Why do all pilots have the same voice?
SPEAKER_18: Welcome to Revisionist History, my show about things overlooked and misunderstood. Today's episode is a conversation with Ben Nadeff-Haffrey, digging into whether and why all pilots sound the same and what that might tell us about aviation and human nature.
SPEAKER_20: All right, so I'm on this unnecessary flight from Vegas to Los Angeles. And I'm sitting next to an off-duty pilot who I later learned was named Rob. Wait, how do you know he's a pilot? So you know he's a pilot because he's got like the epaulettes on his shoulder, the stripes, short sleeve button-down shirt, and also a lanyard that said like Pilots Association or something like that. Dead giveaway. Yeah, you could tell immediately. So I see my golden opportunity and I ask Rob about pilot voice. Do you have a sense that all people think pilots have the same voice?
SPEAKER_08: I definitely have a sense that there's a idea that we kind of make certain noises on the
SPEAKER_20: intercom. Jackpot. I guess my first question to you is, do you share this sense? If I were to ask you what does a pilot sound like, is there a voice in your mind? 100%.
SPEAKER_18: I mean, 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 way in which the doctor addresses you.
SPEAKER_20: 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.
SPEAKER_00: We're looking about a four and a half hour flight time today. Giggity. Or Matt Damon on 30 Rock.
SPEAKER_20: Well folks from the flight deck, it looks like it's going to be about another half hour
SPEAKER_06: and then we'll be on our way. Yeah, so the uh sound is a universal component of pilot voice.
SPEAKER_20: Yeah, universal. And I mean, this is the thing I talked about with Rob. Like his, he does Oz all the time. Okay, so where does that come from?
SPEAKER_08: I think there's some truth to it. I mean, obviously it's not completely true, but you know, 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 going to say, you know, the basics, but your brain's still putting 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
SPEAKER_20: he will actually draw out, uh,
SPEAKER_08: 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, uh, 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.
SPEAKER_20: You think you've like actually done an extra long, uh, Not ridiculously long, but just enough to,
SPEAKER_08: What's like an average length? Uh, maybe something like that. But you have to do it a little bit of a lower tone than that though, you know, Well, I just want like, It's gotta have that lower, lower tone. Oh my God, Rob is a godsend.
SPEAKER_20: I had 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 of fortune, right? And the other guy was like, no, what's that? And he was 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 just, I was like, what is, did you know 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. Yes.
SPEAKER_04: That's going robotic. Excuse me for an impersonation. Oh, you're going to do it.
SPEAKER_04: Let me start. Ladies and gentlemen, please fasten your seatbelts.
SPEAKER_01: I apologize for the rough air, but we should be through it here in about 10 minutes or so.
SPEAKER_04: Then you got to drag them out like, oh, we should be there in about 10 minutes or so. Oh, the time is seven o'clock. Oh, is this consistent with your, with your sense of a pilot's voice?
SPEAKER_17: She was right. It's like robotic.
SPEAKER_04: 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 it's just how I've got to talk.
SPEAKER_20: What I'm wondering is like, do all pilots sound the same? Yes, they do.
SPEAKER_18: They do. They always say folks. Folks? Yes.
SPEAKER_04: I think in general, yes, they have like the same type of tone and they're all like pretty polished. Like whenever they come on, like on, like on the plane, like the intercom or whatever, they all sound the same.
SPEAKER_20: What does a pilot sound like? Like a robot. Do you think all pilots sound the same? Yes.
SPEAKER_00: Except for the black ones.
SPEAKER_20: Except for the black ones. Interesting. What do they sound like?
SPEAKER_17: Black.
SPEAKER_20: And the rest sound like?
SPEAKER_00: Yo people. Yeah, thank you. Wait a minute, wait a minute.
SPEAKER_18: You know about what Tom Wolfe says about this and the right stuff? It's Yeager. It's all Chuck Yeager. Yeah.
SPEAKER_10: The X-1 marked another milestone in aviation history. The time, October 14th, 1947. The pilot, Captain Chuck Yeager.
SPEAKER_20: Chuck Yeager, the famous test pilot from West Virginia, who in 1947 breaks the sound barrier.
SPEAKER_09: The X-1 was mine because I was trained in maintenance and I understood systems and obviously could fly an airplane. So yeah, Tom Wolfe writes the right stuff, 1979.
SPEAKER_20: 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 Yeager.
SPEAKER_18: And in the right stuff, there's that moment where Yeager played by Sam Sheppard says when he's dismissing astronauts, there's spam in a can. And it's pilot voice. Tell you what else, anybody who goes up in the damn thing is going to be spam in a can.
SPEAKER_06: I'll drunk to that.
SPEAKER_20: I actually brought the passage from the right stuff if you want to read it. Okay, here goes.
SPEAKER_18: 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 seat belts because it might get a little choppy. Who doesn't know that voice? And who can forget it even after he is proved right and the emergency is over. That particular voice may sound vaguely southern or southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian 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 1940s and early 1950s, this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high from over the high desert of California, down, down, down from the upper reaches of the 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. Chuck Yeager.
SPEAKER_07: Tom off is so just amazing.
SPEAKER_18: It's so good. He's just it's just like it's Tom off was just the best. Yeah.
SPEAKER_20: 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 listened to Chuck Yeager? I don't know if I ever have. I know Sam Shepard.
SPEAKER_18: It's not the pilot voice.
SPEAKER_07: I'm getting okay now. I got all these alternatives.
SPEAKER_20: I believe there's some essential Yeagerness that is preserved in the pilot's voice, but it's not like a note for note replication of that thing.
SPEAKER_18: I'm as interested in word choice. So folks is clearly huge.
SPEAKER_20: There's a someone at LAX also pointed this out specifically.
SPEAKER_18: What are other vocabulary choices that are central to pilot voice?
SPEAKER_20: Well, I think the euphemisms are huge. So the near miss bumpy air choppy air.
SPEAKER_18: Diminutives a little bit of turbulence got a little bit of. Yeah. It's not like a days ago, but it is. They do want to signal that these problems are so trivial that they can barely muster normal levels of enthusiasm to. Yeah. It's just everything's just kind of, I've seen it all before. Yes. Yeah. There's a, can I do a little thing about the evolutionary basis for pilot voice? Yeah. 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 a voice rises in, is it pitch?
SPEAKER_20: It's also probably like your, I bet your vocal cords tighten and then you become less resonant. Also, I would suspect.
SPEAKER_18: 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 people are making hires based in part on whether or not you have the right
SPEAKER_20: pilot voice?
SPEAKER_18: A hundred percent. We already know that in every other job, some aspect of physical presentation matters hugely in 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 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 stewardess was supposed to be, a flight attendant was supposed to be, right? It was right down, they would like measure their, they would do body measurements of women who were trying to be flight attendants. And you had to look a certain way, have a certain shape, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 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
SPEAKER_20: speakers. And then the second thing people say is it's because they're all white guys.
SPEAKER_18: 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 mean, it could go on. It's like...
SPEAKER_20: Yeah, the same stereotyping and bias as applied in piloting. And it is statistically true. Like about 95% of pilots are white and about 95% of pilots are male, at least as of 2022 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 Jaeger, but I really don't think it's enough to say that all pilots are imitating Chuck Jaeger. 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, Robin not even heard Chuck Jaeger. I certainly don't know what his voice sounded like.
SPEAKER_08: I can't think of it. 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 I do. I don't even realize it.
SPEAKER_20: So something's up. It's not just Chuck Jaeger. What I'm interested in is what does that voice represent and how did it happen that they all sound alike?
SPEAKER_18: We'll be right back.
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SPEAKER_18: Can I do another analogy here? Yeah, yeah, please. So I was thinking about this as you were 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 juries weigh the heaviest is whether or not they feel like the accused is displaying contrition. They have an expectation, in other words, an expectation about a certain mode of self-presentation. Now no one really knows what contrition looks like. There actually isn't. 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 judges much more likely to give you a long sentence. So there's a feedback loop between the party that's giving a presentation and the party that's listening. And I wonder what the pilot is expected to communicate is competence and reassurance. Now, do we have a formal definition of what those things are? Not really, no, 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. We kind of know it when we, you know, this is a vague thing that we know when we see it. People certainly can say he did not, you hear all the time juries saying, we did not see contrite, right? Anyway, this is all like a long way of saying this. 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
SPEAKER_20: and expected by passengers. You got the drawn out ahs, 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. Ever hear of it?
SPEAKER_11: 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. What did he say?
SPEAKER_03: And he's like, oh yeah, it's totally from Chuck Yeager.
SPEAKER_11: 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, show that he was part of the group here. I was like, really? Why did you never tell me this?
SPEAKER_20: 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 experience. 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 into your speech. Communication accommodation 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 unwittingly because of how much else they're doing in the cockpit.
SPEAKER_11: So research in 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.
SPEAKER_20: 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 a two-way thing. So half of it is how you're communicating. Half of it is how you're being perceived.
SPEAKER_11: 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 and 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, uh, right? It could just be one little thing that they're all doing and we're like, okay, they did it, right?
SPEAKER_20: 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 in so far as the majority of people I've spoken to, most people you come across on the street, if you ask them this question, what does the 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 Wolf question, do they have the right stuff? And so there is that kind of, that's part of this projection thing you're referring to as well, like the expectation thing. But it's interesting because you do, 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 up till then is the voice, which they're also aware of. And also it's this crazy situation of they are speaking to several hundred people, all of whom have some kind of background anxiety about flying, which is, 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 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 at something called the Fear of Flying Clinic, which is ironic because...
SPEAKER_13: My last name is not a great pilot thing. So you want to share your last name?
SPEAKER_13: My last name is Stahl and even though there's an H in it, it sounds the exact same. So people will hear... So I never say this is Captain Stahl. 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 nervous about flying, they're going to be like, okay, that's a sign. I got to get out of here.
SPEAKER_20: Captain Stahl. Yeah, that's really unfortunate. I bet it's hilarious. Captain Stahl, 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 PAs, okay, I know what a pilot is supposed to sound like and how do I do my version of the voice or how conscious were you of this thing?
SPEAKER_13: 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 PAs because I was too nervous. I was very comfortable with the flying part, but not with them making PAs. I would also say it's always the male that you hear as a pilot voice when somebody's talking about the pilot voice. So that's one thing about being a woman in this job is trying to get that voice out there for the girls and for the boys, for just people in general to know it's not all just guys flying the plane.
SPEAKER_18: She has a great voice, doesn't she? She does have a great voice. She's funny too though. What I wonder is do we like the fact that she seems to have a little bit of a sense of humor? I think we do.
SPEAKER_20: 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 they're kind of bemused by everything than that they're trying to be a comedian or something. You want somebody who's got a pretty upbeat view of the world and is unhurried. Yeah.
SPEAKER_18: That's right. Yeah. She has that kind of one eyebrow slightly raised.
SPEAKER_20: Yeah, 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. They don't know at all what it means to fly the plane, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_13: Yeah. 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 turbulence because people just want to hear your voice and then they can go like, oh, oh good. 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 just trying 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.
SPEAKER_20: But then the question I had after Gen Pardo and Captain Stahl 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, there are guidelines or samples of what you might say, but it's not so much 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 in 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 reaching for what does a pilot sound like, what does a pilot say, this sort of thing that's totally unnecessary, but is a kind of competence theater.
SPEAKER_18: So why is Tom Cruise allowed to break all the pilot rules? Why is Maverick allowed to?
SPEAKER_20: In general, though, Tom Cruise, even in Mission Impossible, instead of playing the kind of
SPEAKER_18: cool, calm, unflappable, he's always sprinting madly from one thing to the next. 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.
SPEAKER_20: Well, Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise. I mean, 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 one... I forget what movie they were reviewing. I think it was a New York Times review of a Tom Cruise movie. 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 and all this Marvel movie mayhem. But the fact is, Tom Cruise used to be really charming. Like it used to be in the 80s, I feel like 80s and 90s, Tom Cruise was really charming on screen. And now he is functionally 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.
SPEAKER_18: But this does tie into what we're talking about, because 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, we got an intense next 10 minutes. I'm not going to talk to you because I'm going to be so overwhelmed with what I'm doing, but we're going to try really hard and I'm sick. We're going to pull this out. Like, got to go. Tom Cruise essentially is saying, can't talk now, got to go. You got to solve this problem ahead of us. Yes, 100%. Like, all right, I'll talk to you later. Whereas like that's the antithesis. It's only he's allowed to do that. Everyone else has got to do pilot.
SPEAKER_20: I think that's true. And also, I think this is part of what's going on with the, uh, 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 wind in 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 does it assume the uh was just a deliberate affectation to suggest that they're in no
SPEAKER_18: hurry?
SPEAKER_20: I think that's what it is, but it also fills space when they are doing something else. So it's, it's yeah. But yeah, so, 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 epaulettes. 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?
SPEAKER_18: Yeah, I've got a few more questions, but let's take a short break then, and then we'll be right back. This episode of Revisionist History is brought to you by T-Mobile for business. Now is the time for 5g business. These days we have robots that do brain surgery. You can ask an AI chat bot to write your term paper. But yesterday, as I was driving fruitlessly around the parking lot of my local supermarket, all I could think was why can't someone come up with a gizmo that just directs me to the nearest available parking spot? Well, it turns out that's just the kind of solution that T-Mobile for business can come up with. From smarter cities to safer industrial workplaces, 5g can enable a better, more connected world. And T-Mobile for business has the network built for the way business and tech converge today. Right now, workforces are more widely distributed than ever. Industries are ripe for disruption and tech is advancing at a rate that requires vast and secure connectivity. Offering the nation's largest 5g network, T-Mobile is the best network partner to take your business to the next level. Now is the time to business bravely and start building your future today. Go to T-Mobile.com slash now to learn more.
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SPEAKER_18: Okay, we're back.
SPEAKER_20: I do. There's one other thing that's interesting to me. Are you familiar with the sterile cockpit rule? Keep going. This is a regulation that came about after a famous crash in 1974. This is actually the, this is the plane that Stephen Colbert's father and two of his brothers were on when it crashed. And when the regulators reviewed the flight records, listen to the black 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 set of rules called that are colloquially known as the sterile 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, this is one citation. This very senior captain was about to leave on a scuba diving trip and talked nonstop to his female jump seat rider 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 10,000 feet. This I think feeds into the technique versus procedure 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.
SPEAKER_18: And made even more pronounced by the fact that post 9-11, now the pilot's not allowed to leave the cockpit. So pre 9-11, 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, walk around. Oh yeah. I mean, so he was, but he was still, he was very much, 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 awe shocks, reassurance and wisdom. But the disembodied voice is a really modern, it's the last 20 years.
SPEAKER_20: That's really interesting that, I mean, that would suggest that there's more pressure. Theoretically there would be an increase in pilot voice in the last 20 years.
SPEAKER_18: Or at least it would explain persistence of pilot voice. Right.
SPEAKER_20: Even as it becomes a more diverse profession.
SPEAKER_18: Right. It persists because that's all it got.
SPEAKER_05: Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_20: I mean, I wonder if, I mean, it's, it's, it's a crazy time to be flying right now. Though 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 flying is a house of cards right now. 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 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?
SPEAKER_18: No, no, I never have.
SPEAKER_20: It's not him communicating to his passengers, but it is him communicating from the flight deck. This was the famous emergency landing in 2009 when Captain Sully Sullenberger landed his Airbus A320 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 is in its essence conveying not a Chuck Yeager impression or some classic male stereotype, but a human ideal about our ability to solve even the hardest problems under the greatest stress.
SPEAKER_05: Which engines? He lost thrust in both engines, he said. Got it.
SPEAKER_07: Actors 1529, we can get it to you.
SPEAKER_05: Do you want to try to land runway 13?
SPEAKER_06: We're unable. We may end up in the Hudson.
SPEAKER_05: Aye, Cactus, 1549, it can be left traffic to runway 31. Unable.
SPEAKER_20: That, the unable, fantastic. That is like, that is, I'm sorry, Dave, I can't do that. That is the robot voice. That's a hundred percent 2001, the Space Odyssey. Unable.
SPEAKER_06: I'm not sure we can make any runway. Once we're to our right, anything in New Jersey, maybe Teeterboro.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, yeah, off to your right side is Teeterboro Airport. You want to try to go to Teeterboro? Yes. Teeterboro, Empire, actually, look what I depart to guy emergency inbound. There you go. Cactus 1529 over to George Washington Bridge wants to go to your airport right now. Go to your airport, check. Does he need assistance? Yes, he, it was a bird strike. Can I get him in for runway 1? Runway 1, that's good. Cactus 1529, turn right 280, you can land runway 1 at Teeterboro. We can't do it. Okay, which runway would you like at Teeterboro? We're gonna be in the Hudson.
SPEAKER_06:
SPEAKER_05: I'm sorry, say again, Cactus?
SPEAKER_20: We're gonna be in the Hudson. He's so awesome. It is incredible. Unable. The unable, the unable is my favorite, unable.
SPEAKER_20: 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, miss book 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.
SPEAKER_18: The one thing I couldn't stop thinking about Ben throughout this whole episode is whether you have a good pilot's voice.
SPEAKER_20: Well, yeah, someone in the airport said she thought that, I asked her what does a pilot 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 pilot's voice? Do I think I do?
SPEAKER_18: I do too much, too many volume shifts. Yeah. 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 the principal ones.
SPEAKER_20: Yeah, I think I would chiefly fail at flying the plane.
SPEAKER_18: I flew a plane only once in the presence of an experienced copilot. And my copilot was a rabbi who flies on the side. And I have to say, the only thing more reassuring than a kind of Chuck Yeager person next to you is a rabbi. Because he comes from a tradition of intellectual rigor. And you feel like if there is something obscure that he would need to know about the plane, you feel like he would know that.
SPEAKER_20: This is like the Talmudic theory of flying. It's the technique for its procedure thing again.
SPEAKER_18: Rashi said this about flying in bad conditions. He knows that.
SPEAKER_20: That's amazing. All right, well, thanks for those, Malcolm. All right, Ben. Oh, I have one last bit of Rob to play us out. Any pilot voices, sign-offs? Folks, I'd like to thank you for flying with, what's it, Authentic History?
SPEAKER_08: Revisionist History. Revisionist History. I will see you next time.
SPEAKER_20: Yes. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it. Folks, this episode of Revisionist History was produced by Ben Danaf-Haffrey, Jacob Smith,
SPEAKER_18: and Tali Emma. Editing by Sarah Nix. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Jay Korski. And engineering by our very own Neil Lawrence. Special thanks to Richard Dose and Patrick Smith. Folks, I'm your captain, Malcolm Grablow. This episode of Revisionist History is brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. In one of my podcast episodes this season, I asked the surgeon to describe the difference between the technology he uses with the technology available to the surgeons of his parents' generation. He said, it's like going from a bicycle to an electric car. And that same revolution is happening everywhere in every field. With T-Mobile for Business, you get a 5G network built for the way business and tech converge today. With the speed, capacity, and coverage, you need to take your business to the next level. Now is the time to business bravely and start building your future today. Go to T-Mobile.com slash now to learn more.
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