One of the great paradoxes of airline security in the age of Al Qaeda is that anyone with access to the Internet can eavesdrop on pilots and air traffic controllers — in real time.
In a world where a TSA agent will eagerly strip you of a tiny tube of mosquito repellent on the grounds that it contains a potentially threatening amount of DDT, anyone, anywhere, can tune into the radio transmissions that announce an airliner’s speed, altitude, and location.
The ability to listen in on this highly technical palaver is actually a great teaching tool for pilots. And I suppose there are aviation buffs who tune into air traffic control (ATC) on the Internet for a vicarious thrill, the way my Great Aunt Dodo used to listen to fire and police transmissions with her Bearcat Scanner.
If you’re curious, aim your browser at www.liveatc.net, a website that lets you choose from a vast drop-down menu of airport and regional air traffic control frequencies. Liveatc.net works by way of a legion of volunteers who monitor their local ATC frequencies and upload them as live streams to the Web.
This is perfectly legal — in the U.S., anyway. There’s no such thing as Liveatc.net in the United Kingdom, where the re-transmission of official broadcasts is considered a crime.
So let me tell you a little tale of parental anxiety. The morning of August 7th, 2013, as our teenage daughter was flying home — alone — from Lisbon after two happy weeks of family visitation, I was obsessively monitoring her flight, U.S. Airways 739, as it made its way across the Atlantic Ocean. A website called Flightaware.com let me see Flight 739 in the form of a tiny green airplane icon inching over a vast swath of blue water.
Around 1:30PM, I started listening for Flight 739’s first contact with Philadelphia Approach, the first of several frequencies that would enable me to follow her Boeing 757 all the way to the ground.
KPHL is a busy airport, and there were lots of calls crowding the airwaves that afternoon, but eventually I heard a gruff pilot with a heavy southern accent announce her flight as “Cactus 739 — ” Cactus being the code name for U.S. Airways.
The descent from 10,000 feet was uneventful. At the time, there were two other international flights approaching Philadelphia International Airport: Cactus 723, a Boeing 767 inbound from Dublin; and Cactus 777, a Boeing 757 also inbound from Ireland, but from Shannon.
Cactus 777 was the one you may have read about last week, the flight with the bomb threat.
As our daughter’s plane neared the airport, I switched from Philadelphia Approach to Philadelphia Final, and from that frequency over to Philadelphia Tower (PHL-twr). I listened with great relief as her flight was cleared to land, and was then advised to tune into Philadelphia Ground for taxi instructions.
In the thirty minutes or so I was listening, I didn’t hear anything out of ordinary, with one minor exception: Cactus 777, two planes behind hers, had been given a slightly expedited landing clearance, and, unlike the other heavy inbound flights, the ATC controller had asked the pilot how many souls were on board, and how many pounds of fuel.
Later that afternoon, I received a frantic phone call from a family friend in Portugal: had I heard about the bomb threat? Was Nina okay?
Yes, she was fine, and, as I looked up the story on the Web, I saw that the plane had already been searched with bomb-sniffing dogs and cleared. The crisis was over before I’d even heard about it.
But why hadn’t I? I’d overheard the pilot of Cactus 777 speaking with three different air traffic controllers. He hadn’t declared an emergency, which would have temporarily frozen all other air traffic.
Either this was a case of otherworldly calm in the face of an extreme crisis — or the pilot didn’t know about the bomb threat.
After the fact, when I went back and listened to archived versions of the radio calls, including what transpired after I’d tuned out, I concluded that the pilot simply didn’t know.
Here’s a transcript of the conversation that ensued after Cactus 777 had landed and been instructed to taxi to an isolated part of the airport, away from the terminal:
Cactus 777: We want to talk to someone who will tell us what’s going on.
PHL-twr: I can’t tell you what’s going on. Monitor Tower [frequency] 118.5 for your sequence.
Cactus 777: No. We’re the aircraft sitting over here with the trucks all around us.
PHL-twr: Oh, Cactus 777?
Cactus 777: Affirmative.
PHL-twr: Is that who’s talking to me right now?
Cactus 777: Affirmative.
PHL-twr: Roger, let me know if you need anything, Sir.
Cactus 777: We don’t even know what’s going on! We don’t know if we need to shut down here, or what the heck we’re doing.
PHL-twr: You can shut down right there if you’d like. [pause] Cactus 777, I’ve been told to have you contact your company.
Cactus 777: Will do.
I can understand not wanting to distract a pilot on final approach, but not telling him about a credible threat to the airplane he’s flying gives new meaning to the phrase “need-to-know.”
