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Comment by pmachinery | Hacker News Reader

Great post. I was confused by "channel 9" since I thought there may be rules or regulations against receiving ATC on a plane, but for anyone else who didn't know exactly what it referred to, it is (was?) an inflight entertainment feature of United Airlines.

https://www.pilotsofamerica.com/community/threads/united-air...

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Yes. One of the greatest perks of United that they eventually phased out.

You'd tune your headset to Channel 9 on most aircraft and list to ATC just between the tower and your plane. I'd listen to it many times just to understand when we'd get a delay, maintenance issue, airport slowness..etc.

It got me over my fear of flying because I got to learn what the pilots (and the Center) thought about the turbulence we were experiencing and how they were responding to it.

It also inspired me to write the original version of this Wikipedia article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_control_center

I used to prefer flying United over other airlines because they had it; now that they don't, I don't. :-(

See also Microsoft's Channel 9, which was named after channel 9 on United Airline flights.

https://channel9.msdn.com/About/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_9_%28Microsoft%29

It was just a channel on the UA entertainment system (audio) where the pilots could choose to make the ATC transmissions audible to the passengers (if desired). It was highly spotty because enough pilots had bad experiences (or believed they would) based on passengers asking them annoying questions or reporting things that didn't need to be reported, or generally causing more trouble than it was worth.

I still miss channel 9 when I'm taking a United flight. It was by far the best channel on the entire in-flight audio system.

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