AN EXPERT has revealed the real reason why plane announcements are “impossible to hear” during a flight.
If you fail to understand what flight crew say over the mic – you’re not alone.
In-flight announcements are typically difficult to understand – and there’s technical reasons why.
Nick Broste, a musician and audio engineer, told thrillist it’s a combination of factors that make the plane announcements incomprehesible.
He said: “A lot of the equipment is old or on the older side or hasn’t changed much.
“[Plane manufacturers] want to use very light stuff, so the speakers in the actual plane are very small and very light, which means they don’t have a lot of fidelity and they can distort more easily because they don’t get very loud.”
This is the same for the mic that pilots use in the cockpit either with the microphone there or their headset mic.
While the mic’s quality isn’t the best, it is what’s needed.
Nick continued: “They’re optimised to pick up the kind of frequency range that people hear the best for letters, numbers, call signs, and warnings.
“That’s why there’s no low-end because of all the background noise of the plane and the cockpit.
“There’s a bunch of things going on and the signal will be very compressed, so it’ll sound really crunched.”
The mic therefore delivers sound at bad quality because it can’t pick up a wide range of frequencies.
The other thing contibuting to the poor quality is that fact you’re in a plane thousands of feet up in the sky – and therefore have to face loud plane background noise.
On top of this, a third issue that effects sound quality is flight crews “eating the mic”.
Nick explained that this is where flight staff put the mic’s too close to their mouths.
He said: “The reason the sound gets all smashed up is often because of where the person puts the microphone—if it’s right up against their mouth.
“If you record a voice memo with your phone and do that, it’s going to sound pretty smashed and distorted.”
Plane announcements have often gone viral on TikTok discussing how passengers fail to hear announcements.
One commenter on a video said: “The pilot makes an announcement and it sounds like they rolled the windows down in the cockpit.”
Another user added: “Why is it always so staticky.”
