Quote:
Originally Posted by highfarfast
Yeeaaahhhh, I’m not talking about the PAs. In fact, there, too many pilots don’t seem to understand how to talk to passengers and should, in fact, change SOMETHING about what they’re doing.
But there are soooo many guys that key the mic for radio transmissions and suddenly their voice, tenner, and temperament changes. And they go right back to normal when they let go of the button. Why?
2 reasons. Like I said in my first post above, if you sound like you're calm cool and collected, everyone assumes you know what you're doing and everything is good, nobody questions you. Get excited or raise the pitch of your voice and it just gets everyone's attention like something's not right. Then you get people questioning your call, your decisions, everything you do. This is a nearly universal truth. Morgan Freeman could read just about any nonsense and people would pay to hear him say it without even processing the words he's saying, because he just sounds like he knows what he's doing and everything is right with the world when he's talking. People pay to hear James Earl Jones tell people to do stuff, because his voice has a uniquely confident command quality that makes people simply not question what he's saying. You hear him say something and most of us kind of assume it's ok, he's in charge and everything is fine.
The second reason is that you never know when you're gonna be on the news. If you're calm cool and collected on the radio, you instantly get the benefit of the doubt in the public arena especially from people who have absolutely no idea what it's like being a pilot. If you sound cool, you clearly must be cool and doing it right. Stutter, get squeaky, high pitched, anxious, panic, all that sticks out in a radio call and our brains just highlight it as something going wrong, and since the pilot is the MFWIC (mofo whats in charge) it must be his fault or he must suck if he's squeaking in panic on the radio.
So... every single radio call, slow it down, drop the voice an octave, throw in a little drawl without slurring the words. Don't forget, one of our role models growing up was the story of the Edwards test pilot who was stuck in a wildly out of control aircraft with no way of ejecting. He knew that this particular malfunction had killed pilots before, and he knew he was the next to die. Yet he hopped on the radio and in as clear of a voice as he could manage he continued to read out test parameters hoping that the information he transmitted would save the NEXT guy. Listen to Sully's radio transmissions again. He's speaking clearly without slurring, his voice is low but within a normal range for a guy who is not panicking, and the only hint that he's in the fight of his life is that his transmissions start getting shorter and ever so slightly faster. Cool competence under stress. If you don't do it every radio transmission just to establish the habit pattern, the first time you really get in a world of poop inflight your radio transmission is going to sound like a teletubby on fire being chased by a tiger. Not a good image, and again you never know when you're gonna be on the news.