I flew up and down the east coast for a couple of days and then ended the trip out west.
On the east, there were almost constant idiot games on guard. The meowing, beavis, and other nonsense was really bad. I mean nearly continuous.
Out west, past Mississippi, I don't think I heard any of it, even once.
Anyone got any theories on why it's so bad over 1/2 the country?
-And when the hell is the FAA gonna come down on some of these dumb ****s? They have warned folks. They definitely have the capability. I'm all for nailing some of these jerks. I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone who ruins their career with meowing.
"ALPA Aviation Safety Chair: "Please Adhere to Guard Frequency Protocols"
Those who monitor ATC communications and use of the guard frequency have contacted ALPA asking pilots to refrain from misuse of 121.5 for any communications other than an emergency and to use standard radio phraseology in all radio transmissions.
"I would like to remind all members to adhere to standard communications techniques and protocols at all times," says ALPA Aviation Safety chair Captain Steve Jangelis. "The use of nonstandard phraseology can be a causal factor for confusion by other pilots trying to maintain situational awareness, and events leading up to runway incursions, altitude deviations, frequency congestion, and near midair collisions."
Jangelis also reminds pilots that transmissions on guard frequencies should be nearly nonexistent except for emergency situations or for passing critical information to mitigate hazardous situations.
Familiarization with and adherence to standard phraseology, and use of the guard frequency only for communicating flight-safety issues will help ensure that the highest level of safety and professionalism is maintained."
I agree. It's totally out of control. Makes me wonder about the weak d$ck leadership from the Captains in those cockpits. The funny thing is that it only happens in the United States. You don't hear that childish crap anywhere else in the world.
Do they no longer teach what that frequency is there for? Do the idiots chatting on guard prank call 911 for fun on off days? I wonder how many radio calls are missed on the primary frequency due to idiots jabbering away on guard.
1. Only guys. I've never heard a female, not once.
2. Don't say anything. Please, it's like chumming the water. It just attracts more of them and makes things worse.
3. Don't assume it's some RJ pilot. I once rode a legacy JS and the young captain was doing it. "Meow." I wanted to strangle him. Finally the FO told him to please stop.
It's not hard to triangulate the broadcast and pull a few CVRs. The guard idiots would never know.
And once again, such a stupid way to kill a career. There is no way anyone can talk their way through this stupidity in an interview. People who get nailed doing this are 100% done. They will never get hired anywhere worth working at.
You do remember that you started a carbon copy of this same thread content in November of 2015, right? Just bored and need to stir things up?
Yeah, it actually is hard to "triangulate" a VHF transmission without specialized equipment distributed over a wide area. It would require a dedicated FCC task force to enforce. And even so, the margin of error can be miles dues to inference patterns on congested frequencies.
Folks, this thread is a rehash. This guy is the APC forum equivalent of a guard troll.
Hey Learflyer the Gestapo called.... They are running out of Nazi's. Lighten up Francis.
Who is not flying in these areas and at night?
The whole thing is a issue of maturity. Younger Pilots are probably the main, but not the only culprits.
It's not an issue of being laid back. It's a grow the F$&@ up issue. Guard has a specific purpose. Pilots who do this are compromising safety and spamming the airwaves. Literally thousands of us have to listen to their drivel.
It's not an issue of being laid back. It's a grow the F$&@ up issue. Guard has a specific purpose. Dip sh$ts like you (who else would defend this) are compromising safety and spamming the airwaves. Literally thousands of us have to listen to your drivel.
I have never used guard in my life. I laugh as yall make it worse by egging on the people who goof around on it. Yes it can get annoying and I have found myself turning down the volume. Lighten up Francis!!!
Over the Atlantic there was always some light banter with guys calling in a position report on Guard or Air/Air. When Delta, UAL, CAL mainline followed AA into the Caribbean and Latin America, there wasn't any of this krap. Only when the EMB's started south did the krap start there although it's still very infrequent and not too bad.
Personally, I am more offended by the poor comedic performances than I am by the lack of professionalism (that annoys me too, just not as much). 99% of the "jokes" are just people repeating what they heard someone else do. Cool, you downloaded a soundboard on your phone. Was that a joke about guard being Delta's ops frequency?... clever.
I have. I'll claim a save on a lost Student Pilot surrounded by TRW's. It was pre-9/11 when nobody monitored it. I acted as a relay between him and a Approach Control Radar facility until they painted him. I also reported multiple ELT's during that time. Not the usual screw ups transmit in major populated areas, but those in isolated areas including marine ELT's in the Caribbean.
Pretty much agree. If you can't keep quiet, make it short and damn funny and don't repeat it. Maybe some quick mic clicks as applause.
It's quite common in the international arena to use guard. If people are dicking around on 121.5 the normal response is to turn your volume down. Then you could miss an actual emergency or someone self broadcasting because they have to deviate off route without a clearance. Whether or not you've used guard is irrelevant. I've never had to call 9/11. I like to know it's there in case I need it.
Everybody likes a laid back Flight deck. This isn't a case of 'lighten up.' It's a case of pilots with ADD not acting professionally.
Couldn't agree more with your observation of when guard frequency is silent.
Do they no longer teach what that frequency is there for?
The OP is right though, this crap rarely happens in the West or over the Pacific.
The people out west aren't more sophisticated. There is alot less flights out west. As opposed to the highly populated east.
FWIW. Heard a student pilot distress call over guard. This pilot flew into inadvertent IMC over the Atlantic Ocean just east of New Smyrna Beach. Controller was trying to talk her back over land and into VFR. Student pilot was responding, ever increasingly frantic. This went on for about 4-5 minutes and then all you heard was the controller trying to raise the student. No response. The next day in the paper there was an article about a student pilot who crashed and died in the Atlantic just east of NSB. Prior to this day I believed that the misuse of the guard frequency was immature and unprofessional. After that day I realized that the misuse of guard is dangerous and potentially deadly. When I hear folks messing around on guard, I remember the day that I heard a pilot die and wonder if there is currently a pilot trying to reach a controller on guard to ask for vital information that could save their life and the life of their passengers.
It's actually very easy and inexpensive to do these days.
Geek level 1000 reading ahead.
It isn't even the frequency-clogging that bothers me the most, it's how UNFUNNY they are. Regurgitating meme's from 15 years ago and chuckling. Got any good OJ jokes?
That would be consistent with what's probably 1% of the traffic vs over the lower 48 9-5 hours.
It's the worst in the S.E. area of the country. I just turn the volume down or off if it's a distraction.
They would only have to catch and prosecute a few to make it stop.
The prosecution would be federal, DOJ, not FAA violations. Radio is the FCC.
You shouldn't have to ASAP a missed handoff because tools pollute your backup freq. ATC calling you on guard is a freebee. If they have to pick up a phone to have company sendan ACARS, their current policy is to report that as a deviation.
Just get a general idea of the location, and pull up ATC tapes-or hell, flight aware.
At most, they would have to pull two or three CVRs.
One of the greatest safety tools this industry benefits from is anonymous self-disclosure and non-punitive monitoring of data FOQA/ASAP etc. To play along with your fantasy of CVR based discipline, handing out CVR tapes and other onboard data to a grab bag of entities just to satisfy your guard police fetish would have a major impact on industry safety, and undermine decades of reasearch and data gathering.
Or the MTV, Jersey Shore, Miley Cirrus crowd could start acting like professionals. Just sayin'.
Quite effective rebuttal there Socrates.
We shouldn't even need to have this conversation. But then again you should know that lumpkins.
Everyone knows Guard misuse is foolish. What is even more foolish is using onboard data currently used for non-punitive safety purposes to combat and prosecute it.
The difficulty is getting FCC employee to hang out all day in multiple facilities spread across the country. Then, after getting a list of locations they would have to find out which facility had the tapes, compare their locations with the radar returns. Then they have to figure out who was on the flight and get a warrant for the CVR (something ALPA would put up a fight for). I just find it hard to believe that any controller has time in their day to do this. If the FCC and FAA really cared they would actually do this, but like PED in the cockpit, they have bigger things to worry about.
Seems like the best solution to me is to make a call to pro standards whenever you see someone do this.
In theory it's easy to triangulate a VHF transmission, while in this function....extremely difficult and costly.
From a cost perspective, they will just let the guard police (you) keep doing their thing.
They can't just pull a CVR either.
Controller 1: "Hey, Bob, how is your sector going?"
Controller 2: "Good except for this annoying chatter on guard"
Controler 1: "Just write down the exact time you hear a transmission down to the millisecond. Then we will call all the other sectors around us and ask them to find the exact same transmission and send us the time they received it. Once we get 4 of them, we can find someone who has a masters in geometry to find the point of transmission. Then we reference the radar data for the time of the transmission and find the flight number. We can then contact the airline and ask for the name of the flight crew and the CVR. I am sure an airline would have no problem providing us with that information."
Controller 2: "I think I'll just wait 2 minutes for the pilot to get bored of meowing or fly out of range"
"They" being the FAA, maybe correct.
But DOJ can get a warrant to pull anything if needed.
several federal departments are quite good at that, and have mobile assets. It wouldn't be cheap, so it's questionable whether they'd incur the cost. But if they wanted it bad enough, no brainer.
They'd only have to prosecute one airline pilot, with suitable publicity, and problem solved.
Lol what? A deviation for a missed handoff? I'll believe it when I see it, and I've gotten several of those ACARS messages (including when both myself and the other crewmember were alert and attentive and monitoring guard and still never heard our callsign) and I've never filed an ASAP and I've never heard a word about it.
Anybody consider it's a bored out of their mind small airport controller? If it keeps happening in the same place all the time.
I'm just kind of sick of the guard police talking on the ATL ramp frequency.
They are doing it to SKW as we speak. Maybe they got too lazy (plus there are a lot of them out there to generate a "trend").
And one time would do it. They get to solve a safety problem for decades with a single event. And eventually if left unchecked, this lack of professionalism will hurt someone and they'll be forced to do it anyway.
Might as well do it preemptively, hang up a scalp where the rest of the children can see it and realize they need to find a different immature game to amuse their infantile minds with and be done with it.
All those programs protect non-intentional violations.
It could be argued that the FAA should t have come down so hard on those Delta 330 pilots who got distracted and overflew their destination. That was 100% unintentional.
I have heard 3 real life emergencies messed up by these idiots. I have no patience with this crap. Anyone caught meowing or whatever on an emergency freq has no business in an airplane.
Permanent revocation would be good.
@ 2:06 during a tense military operation over disputed islands in the pacific some jackwagon give a cats meow. Coincidence that DL had just checked in @ :49?
It could be argued that the FAA should t have come down so hard on those Delta 330 pilots who got distracted and overflew their destination.
When some paying pax die of gross negligence and buffoonery, they are just as dead as if they died of some intentional violation.
I got a letter from the LAS FSDO for missing a handoff in ZLA airspace. Even though we were both alert and monitoring guard, we never heard our call sign. When we passed BLD, I said, "we should have gotten switched to Albuquerque." We looked up the freq old school on the chart and checked in. They asked me to call ZLA. I did and they said they had been trying to reach us. I think the controller dropped the ball. But I called our POI and told him about the letter and he advised me to act like it was our fault, be humble, and it would go away. That's exactly what I did and the LAS FSDO inspector had me take a couple online wings classes, and then circular filed the whole incident. I checked and it's not on my record.
But yes, they will go after you for a missed handoff.
If anyone was wondering, I really doubt the military would play games on guard... they take themselves pretty seriously, and if there was any press coverage on something like that there would be a general/flag level witch hunt to find the perp.
Well there was press coverage over the Navy's new "holding pattern"
Nothing illegal about putting contrails in the Okanogan MOA.
Every time you eff around on guard, karma takes ten grand from your A plan.
Helped 1 fellow get picked up after landing out in the Florida boonies. Funny part was all the guard guards that didn't hear both sides to have the context.
Heard a bailout and seat pinger, to a safe nylon landing, but that was on UHF guard.
I don't think FSAP offers any protection from willful neglect and intentional violation of FARs which is what we're talking about in this thread.
This guard stuff is very intentional, and people can die because of it. Blocking controllers trying to help distressed aircraft w/clowning happens all the time.
That is some kind of bull****. I wonder if we can report a violation, for a controller that forget to give a frequency change.
Would be time to start some kind of lobbying and draw the line somewhere.
If a controller wants to initiate something like that he has to tell his boss who determines whether it was error or deviation. Tapes will get pulled. It's not like an altitude on an arrival where the computer flags it and SOMEBODY has to go down. If ATC can't show they tried to call you, then the matter will end there (unless there's some intramural spat between facilities and one of them is so bent about getting planes without handoffs that they dime out their buddies).
It's true that radio calls can get blocked or even have poor reception due to atmospherics or degraded equipment, and pilots might get blamed for that.
Yes, you can call center and make a complaint, which will trigger an investigation by the separate organization that oversees air traffic control. They have their own investigators and the quality control people should get back to you on your complaint. I've seen this happen several times.
I tend to be an astute follower of aviation incidents and I have never heard of a DL 330 destination overflight. NW 320, yes. But the 330 is a new one to me. Details please.
Sure in theory it's technologically possible to determine the position of a transmission. In reality, does the required infrastructure exist to identify the location of a short transmission to sufficient accuracy and reliability to form the basis of an enforcement? I'm pretty skeptical.
Sure, there are some amazing gee-whiz things that can be done. It's one thing to identify a voice by comparing to other existing voice recordings It's kind of a different proposition to identify an anonymous person making unauthorized transmissions on guard. Once you've created your voice fingerprint of the guard idiot, what next? You get warrants to force voice recordings of all pilots in the vicinity at the time? How do you think that conversation with the judge is going to go?
Just pull the tapes from every tower and center within a thousand miles and run them through the computer to get a match. If these guys are active fliers, their voices will be on those tapes, and the tapes are indexed by date and time. You won't even have to get an order from a judge for anything but a list from the company of who was flying that flight. That narrows it down to two suspects. looking at past schedules where those two pilots weren't flying together will quickly show you which one was the culprit. Threaten to charge the other one with aiding and abetting if he doesn't testify against the culprit.
This isn't rocket science. Any competent investigator could do it.
I'll grant you, if all you got is a couple of meows you probably won't get anything with forensic validity, but some of these idiots babble on long enough that you'll get sufficient data and you are only going to have to jail one or two if these guys - and fine their employers who hold the licenses on the equipment they are using - to get the message across.
The NSA does things thousands of times more involved every day of the week with real time voice data in a dozen different languages. RC-135 guys did it decades ago, albeit on a far smaller scale.
But I gotta ask, why do you have such an interest in protecting these lawbreakers? There is certainly no constitutional right to jam emergency frequencies.
Sigh. I actually considered putting in my previous post some sort of disclaimer that I have no sympathy for the guard abusers. Then I thought, nah, nobody is that dumb. I guess I forgot where I was for a moment. OK, for the record, I'm not trying to protect them, and it's a pretty looong and irrational stretch to read that into my words. But since you've made the effort, I'd be just as happy as anyone else to have one publicly pilloried and have the rest intimidated into quitting the game. But, I also think that it's a silly fantasy to believe the the FAA and or the FCC is going to bring the technological and investigative resources to bear on the issue. Much as you're living in fantasy-land believing that there's any chance a criminal prosecution resulting in imprisonment would be possible.
Bull. It's EASILY possible and almost certainly WILL happen once the first accident occurs. And it may well be retroactive since the tapes will still exist and the statute of limitations probably goes back a few years. Some young energetic federal prosecutor will quite possibly build a political career and Congress can get involved, just like they did after the Colgan Buffalo crash.
But the hope that someone could resolve this before people died and serious criminal charges get filed isn't a silly fantasy, merely hoping common sense will prevail.
Hoping for common sense to prevail qualifies as a silly fantasy.
Drones, lasers, and current medical standards are a bigger threat to aviation than guard abuse. Until the FAA actually figures out a way to address the first 3 items, I don't see them doing anything about guard.
The easiest solution is just to ignore anyone you hear fooling around on guard. Replying, "You're on Guard" or "Knock it off" is exactly what they are looking for.
How can I maintain separation from the aircraft in front of me going to the same runway? A 737 looks pretty much the same from directly behind from 5 miles and 4 miles. It's the controller laying off their responsibility on to us.
I've started saying I don't have the aircraft ahead in sight because it happens every single time.
This is hardly a new ATC technique. They've been doing this for decades. Yes, they are laying off their responsibility on you. Maybe you deny them when it makes sense. Other times, it might be in everyone's best interest to work with them. Blanket policies of turning down visuals on principle may not always make the most sense.
How to maintain separation? Don't go faster than him. :D Take a peek at TCAS - if the spacing is good, ask his speed (indicated) and match it. If the spacing isn't good, then don't accept the visual. Getting tight? Slow early unless ATC gave you a speed to hold or just inform them you have to slow. Not rocket science.
I use the range rings on the fish finder.
I hate that call the tower at the FAF crap. Whenever they give me it I just switch over and call immediately, I don't care. How about they do their job and look at the radar to figure out who's first. I'm looking at you CLT.
MDW too. "Tower at RUNTS."
Not worth getting your knickers in a twist. "Not in sight" works like a charm all the time.
Or just call the traffic and fly a visual approach like a champ! If it doesn't work out, go around.
Yeah, that flies in the face of known human factors... people don't remember to do things in the future particularly well unless there's some tangible trigger or reminder.
You mean like crossing the FAF?
ATC does do some stuff that I have an issue with. But vectoring me to final and asking me to give tower a call for my landing clearance when I get to the marker isn't one of them.
I can't imagine this step is that difficult to remember since it's pretty much tied to receiving a landing clearance.
The problem is, they usually assign a speed to the marker also. That means right as I am about to call Tower, the PF will call for flaps, gear, and landing checklist. That is a lot of stuff to get done before we hit 1,000 feet AGL on the plane I currently fly. Personally, I call the tower about 1/2 mile early to make sure I don't get rushed.
Sounds good to me. It sounds like you use some solid ADM, which is exactly what we get paid to do as professional aviators.
The grey area here is that radio-land is not perfect... they could have a tape of the controller making the call, even more than once, but atmospherics or other calls might have prevented you from hearing it. And there's no way to ever know or prove that.
I think they at least owe you a call on guard, in case the problem is the assigned freq.