Since the late 1940s, pilots have loved and imitated Chuck Yeager’s laconic, folksy drawl
Every time you sit on a plane while traveling for the holidays, a voice that is all too familiar greets you.
As We Are the Mighty reports, the PA system hisses to life and you hear, “ladies and gentlemen, ehhh, good morning. Welcome aboard. This is, ehh, your, uhhh, captain speaking…” before the rest of the relevant travel information is droningly rattled off.
No matter who the pilot is, where you’re taking off from, or where you’re going, every single one of the 850,000+ pilots out there adopts the exact identical speech pattern and pseudo-West Virginian accent.
Why do airline pilots who speak to passengers through the plane’s intercom sound so bored?
‘It’s mainly because of this guy,’ Tim Hibbetts, airline pilot, explains on Quora.
‘That’s Chuck Yeager, a famous sound barrier pioneer. His laconic, folksy drawl was admired and copied by pilots since the late ‘40s. Before long, it became the standard pilot radio voice. Only the coolest characters could toss in a, “well… things seem to be shakin’ ‘round… lemme see what’s goin’ on a minute” and really sell it. That’s just about how things came across from Jim Lovell when his spaceship blew up!
‘Ever since he made it famous, pilots all over have taken it up (certainly others were talking on the radio like this long before and I imagine the whole panoply of RAF transmissions during the Battle of Britain was a series of mild statements of amazement). The feeling behind it for the PAs from the flight deck amount to, “If I sound bored, things must be normal and you should be very confident things are going just fine.”’
Hibbetts concludes;
‘That’s how we like it to sound, anyway.’
Photo by U.S. Air Force and Steve Jurvetson via Wikipedia