Ever Wonder Why Plane Announcements Are So Hard To Hear?

If you've been on a flight recently, you probably heard the captain making announcements over the speakers — but did you actually understand what they were saying? You might have caught: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking," but frustratingly often, everything that comes after sounds more like the pilot is playing a kazoo into your ear than providing helpful information. If you're hard of hearing, it can be even more difficult to figure out what they're saying. Not being able to understand pilot announcements is such a common occurrence that it has become kind of a running joke among frequent fliers, but fewer people actually know why this happens. The main reason is probably one you could have predicted: The speakers and mics on airplanes are typically not very good.

It might seem odd that something as high-tech as an airplane would have a worse sound system than your average podcaster, but there is a reason it's not top of the line. In general, airlines try to keep all their equipment as lightweight as possible, so a higher-quality speaker system just isn't worth the weight. Combined with the roaring of the airframe noise, the engine noise, and wind whipping by the plane that has anxious flyers reaching for their noise-canceling headphones, lightweight speakers just can't keep up. The result? A garbled mess where your flight updates should be.

Flight attendants can give you a lot of helpful information, from the best time to board your plane to when you can (or can't) change seats on your flight, but one of the most useful things about their announcements is that they're comprehensible. Unlike the weirdly distorted captain updates, the announcements flight attendants make through the cabin PA system tend to be a lot easier to understand. This has to do with the difference between the mics that flight attendants use and the one your captain usually has.

The flight attendant interphone — the old-fashioned-looking phone flight attendants often use to make announcements — is good for a lot of things, from calling another member of the cabin crew to help out with an annoying passenger request to asking the pilot to put the fasten seatbelt sign on. They're also decent for sound quality. As long as the flight attendant isn't breathing right into the receiver, it should be possible to understand what they're saying. 

Pilots, however, tend to use headsets or cockpit microphones to make their announcements. These are both designed to clearly transmit things like the numbers and letters in important codes during an emergency, while filtering out frequencies that are usually background noise from the cockpit. Unfortunately, some important sounds, like the actual words the captain is trying to say to passengers, are also left out. Even worse, the headset does not hold the mic at a great angle and is usually way too close to the captain's mouth, so it sounds muffled no matter what.