AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018 - 97

P&E

DOGFIGHT
To listen or not to listen? Satellite radio and Bluetooth headset connectivity
make it easy to liven up your trip with tunes-but should you?

No music zone

Music hath charms

Keep distractions at bay

Everyone has a soundtrack

BY DAVE HIRSCHMAN

BY JILL W. TALLMAN

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
DAVE HIRSCHMAN
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.
AOPA

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 crosscountry 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
JILL W. TALLMAN
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.
AOPA

EMAIL dave.hirschman@aopa.org

EMAIL jill.tallman@aopa.org

www.aopa.org/pilot AOPA PILOT | 97


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AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018

Contents
AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018 - Intro
AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018 - Cover1
AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018 - Cover2
AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018 - Contents
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AOPA Pilot Magazine - July 2018 - Cover3
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