Dogfight

No music zone

Keep distractions at bay

By Dave Hirschman

If there’s one thing pilots don’t need, it’s another distracting device to manage in flight. More devices have got to meet an extremely high utility bar, and in-flight music just isn’t that useful.

Sure, music can be soothing, inspiring, and lovely—and it can provide a soundtrack to our time aloft. But the things I most enjoy hearing while airborne are the symphony of pulsating pistons in a Lycoming IO-360, and the magic words “cleared direct.” Chance the Rapper and his fellow artists can only mask those sounds, or cause me to miss them entirely. I’d feel pretty foolish if tapping my feet to Cocoa Butter Kisses ever caused me to miss a traffic call.

When I’m flying by myself, I like hearing the engine(s) and ATC, pretty much in that order. When I’m flying with others, I want to hear those things plus whatever’s on their minds. Music can end those conversations, or keep them from starting.

And it can also provide points of contention. To say my teenage son and I don’t share the same musical taste is a monumental understatement. He’s the only reason I know, for example, that Chance the Rapper is an actual person who sings Cocoa Butter Kisses. And if I ever wanted to get my kid to bail out of an airplane in flight, my favorite Talking Heads album might just push him over the edge.

On a marathon two-day cross-country flight in a slow airplane against a relentless headwind, AOPA colleague Alyssa Cobb turned on the tunes to break up the monotony somewhere over Oklahoma. But Bob Seeger’s Against the Wind didn’t exactly cheer us up.

Today’s Bluetooth headsets allow every person in the airplane to listen to their own tunes, but what good is that? We might as well all play solitaire in the same bus station. That kind of technology separates us, it doesn’t bring us together.

For safety reasons, airplanes equipped with in-cockpit music should have a radio-priority switch so the tunes don’t block out ATC or the intercom. In busy airspace, that means that you only hear fragments of songs, hardly enough to really enjoy them.

Some subscription services allow you to listen to radio programs in flight. But I’d rather go deaf in an MU–2 without a headset than listen to Howard Stern. (OK, that’s an exaggeration—but you get the point.)

Here’s the bottom line: My airplane came with a receiver that provides music and satellite radio in flight, and I used it so seldom that I allowed the subscription to expire. My mind and spirit are fully engaged by flying. I don’t need any more entertainment than that.

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Music hath charms

Everyone has a soundtrack

By Jill W. Tallman

I like music. I listen to it while I drive a car. So why shouldn’t I have music in the airplane with me?

Music lets me relax so that I’m not clenching the yoke. It keeps that little voice at bay that sometimes pops up and announces, “Hey, you’re hurtling above the Earth at 5,500 feet in a tin can! Just what the heck do you think you’re doing?”

One of the best days of my flying career was the day I purchased a pair of Bose A20s that let me listen to the music on my iPod—and, later, iPhone—while droning along on a cross-country flight. Now the Bose A20 uses Bluetooth technology so you don’t have to mess around with extraneous cords. Plus, you can set it to automatically mute so you don’t miss a call from air traffic control. Pilots on an IFR flight plan might find this feature more annoying than entertaining.

There are lots of pilots who enjoy the variety of tunes available to them on Sirius XM. Smooth jazz with your weather display—why not? Back in the day, pilots would tune in AM frequencies on automatic direction finders to pick up baseball games. Some pilots leave the otherwise-unutilized ADF in an airplane just for this reason.

Other aircraft owners rig CD players or cassette players to the audio panel. On my very first trip to EAA AirVenture in AOPA Editor in Chief Tom Haines’ Beechcraft Bonanza A36, Tom invited his passengers to bring along their favorite CDs. I remember Billy Joel was singing as Ohio and Indiana unspooled beneath us.

A caveat to listening to music while flying is this: within reason and judiciously. Never while running a checklist. Never on final approach, or when extra concentration is required (as when looking for traffic in a busy area). Pilots need to know their own distraction limits. If music crosses that threshold, then of course they should save it for later.

One final anecdote about pilots who like listening to music in the cockpit: When I took my Piper Cherokee 140 to an avionics shop to have ADS-B installed, the shop manager told me they once had a customer arrive in a Cessna 150 with a cassette player loaded with the Top Gun soundtrack. Unknown Cessna pilot, I salute you. Let’s load flying music into our underpowered chariots and take turns asking the tower for a fly-by.

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