A mysterious voice is haunting American Airlines’ in-flight announcements and nobody knows how

Authored by waxy.org and submitted by yourparadigm

Here’s a fun Friday mystery for you: there are multiple reports of a mysterious voice grunting, moaning, and groaning on American Airlines’ in-flight announcement systems, sometimes lasting the duration of the flight — and nobody knows who’s responsible or how they did it.

Actor/producer Emerson Collins was the first to post video, from his Denver flight on September 6:

These sounds started over the intercom before takeoff and continued throughout the flight.

They couldn’t stop it, and after landing still had no idea what it was. pic.twitter.com/F8lJlZHJ63 — Emerson Collins (@ActuallyEmerson) September 23, 2022

Here’s an MP3 of the audio with just the groans, moans, and grunts, with some of the background noise filtered out.

But Emerson is one of several people who have experienced this on multiple different American Airlines flights. This thread collects several different reports, on both Airbus A321 and Boeing 737-800 planes.

"Currently on AA1631 and someone keeps hacking into the PA and making moaning and screaming sounds 😨 the flight attendants are standing by their phones because it isn’t them and the captain just came on and told us they don’t think the flight systems are compromised so we will.. — 🇺🇦 JonNYC 🇺🇦 (@xJonNYC) September 18, 2022

Other people have reported similar experiences on American Airlines, going as far back as July.

My wife and I experienced this during an AA flight in July. To be clear, it was just sounds like the moans and groans of someone in extreme pain. The crew said that it had happened before, and had no explanation. Occurred briefly 3 or 4 times early in the flight, then stopped — Bradley P. Allen (@bradleypallen) September 23, 2022

View from the Wing’s Gary Leff asked American Airlines about the issue, and their official response is that it’s a mechanical issue:

American Airlines inspected the Boeing 737-800 as well as the P.A. system itself after these reports. They tell me that maintenance “determined the sounds were caused by an issue with the PA amplifier. There was no external access to the system.”

This explanation feels woefully incomplete to me. How can an amplifier malfunction broadcast a human voice without external access? This isn’t audio feedback, it’s clearly the vocalizations of a human.

Professional reverse engineer/hardware hacker/security analyst Andrew Tierney (aka Cybergibbons) dug up the Airbus 321 documents in this thread, and is stumped too.

They don't tend to put things in planes that are not needed.

You can speak on the interphone (the cabin telephone system) from lots of places including the belly panel and engines. But it's wired. — Cybergibbons 🚲🚲🚲 (@cybergibbons) September 23, 2022

“And on the A321 documents we have, the passenger announcement system and interphone even have their own handsets. Can’t see how IFE or WiFi would bridge,” Tierney wrote. “Also struggling to see how anyone could pull a prank like this.”

This report found by aviation watchdog JonNYC, posted by a flight attendant on an internal American Airlines message board, points to some sort of as-yet-undiscovered remote exploit.

We also know that, at least on Emerson Collins’ flight, there was no in-seat entertainment, eliminating that as a possible exploit vector.

They did not! This was a watch inflight entertainment on your phone flight — Emerson Collins (@ActuallyEmerson) September 23, 2022

One plausible theory comes from “a former avionics guy” posting in r/aviation on Reddit:

The most likely culprit IMHO is the medical intercom. There are jacks mounted in the overhead bins at intervals down the full length of the airplane that have both receive, transmit and key controls. All somebody would need to do is plug a homemade dongle with a Bluetooth receiver into one of those, take a trip to the lav and start making noises into a paired mic. The fact that the captain’s announcements are overriding (ducking) it but the flight attendants aren’t is also an indication it’s coming from that system.

If this was how it was done, there’s no reason the prankster would need to hide in the bathrooms: they could trigger a soundboard or prerecorded audio track from their seat.

Any other theories how this might be possible? I’d love to hear them, and I’ll keep this post updated.

EMPlRES on September 24th, 2022 at 15:42 UTC »

It’s just the plane breaking inanimate character and is in mild pain cause of the high winds.

Gwingle on September 24th, 2022 at 14:55 UTC »

The fact that the only seemingly-plausible explanation is that it's someone on the flight plugging into the medical intercom clandestinely is wild. That means either one person is doing this to target AA, or multiple people are. If so, are they organized, or just copycats? Fucking insane.

ellieD on September 24th, 2022 at 13:34 UTC »

Terrifying sounds if heard on a plane!

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