Aviation Communications is a mix of old and new technology, but the primary communications – voice – is plain old AM radio. Just like it was in the 1940s.
There are arguments for that. You want the simplest, most reliable system for potentially urgent communications. And AM proponents have long noted that when two AM signals ‘double’ – transmit at the same time – the result in receivers is a heterodyne; the transmission may be garbled, but at least the receiver knows it happened.
Our guest in this episode, retired airline pilot and YouTuber Captain Steeve, has his own take, and we’ll get the details in this episode, but he will claim that the current AVcomm system has cost lives, and it didn’t have to.