Unnecessary Chatter

When pilots start chatting in the cockpit, they’re not only breaking the rules, but could be putting the safety of passengers at risk.

Pilots will tell you the most crucial and dangerous times in air travel are takeoff and landing. Those are the times with the greatest room for human error in flight, and those are the times with the least amount of airspace for correcting mistakes.

To ensure safety during these crucial flight windows, every airport has an air-traffic-control tower staffed with controllers sitting in front of banks of giant radar screens. They’re in constant verbal contact with every plane coming and going from their airport — a stressful and mind-blowing task!

To capture the magnitude of just how much air traffic these controllers monitor, show your congregation the one-minute YouTube video of the world air-traffic-control radar listed in the sources below. Every plane is represented by a yellow dot, hence the yellow smears streaming in and out of New York, London and Hong Kong.

So with the steady stream of takeoffs and landings, most pilot-tower interactions stay quick and to the point....