121.5 is NOT a Joke!

Copied from a previous thread:
As far as tracking down the 'meows' (no connection to my avatar!) - would take a combination of a VHF automatic direction finder and ADS-B reception. Seems like it should be a relatively simple RF & software task to put the 2 signals together - some software to distinguish noise on 121.5 from intelligible speech (?), and correlate the 2 sources. Assuming, that there's (usually) only one on at a time. It would probably only take a few of these, operated at un-announced varying locations, along with significant fines, to drastically reduce this problem (kinda like having random hidden highway speed traps).
 
MarkL said:
I tend to not monitor it because it is mostly cat noises, but my part time SIC does (he is a major carrier captain, and guard is part of his company SOPs) and last week he picked up this LSA fuel starvation shortly after takeoff emergency from 2 states away: https://aviation-safety.net/wikibase/570442
Click to expand...
I don't either, but technically we should!

FDC NOTAM 4/4386, Special Notice, requires all aircraft operating in United States National Airspace to maintain, if capable, a listening watch on VHF Guard 121.5 or UHF 243.0.
 
This thread makes me feel better about myself. I thought I was the only one who actually used em-dashes on a daily basis. I have struggled to adjust my own writing to distance it from LLM-generated text.
 
In my minimal years and hours, I've heard the puddy dat maybe once.
It was not interfering with anything safety of flight.
I bet the gubvermint could figure this out real simple for a problem

 
I rarely monitor 121.5, since I only have one radio. This weekend, I did monitor it on a 3 hour XC from Atlanta to Tampa. I heard one meow. It was very short, maybe a half second. IMO that is an acceptable ratio of feline activity to safety silence.
 
Just wondering…. I’d never heard of this whole thing until I started seeing people post about it. Since then it kind of feels like the more people complain the more I hear it. Is that just my imagination or did it seem like that to anyone else?
 
Lowflynjack said:
I don't either, but technically we should!

FDC NOTAM 4/4386, Special Notice, requires all aircraft operating in United States National Airspace to maintain, if capable, a listening watch on VHF Guard 121.5 or UHF 243.0.
Click to expand...
Capable but unable. The cat noises make me want to cry about it online.
 
Davidl13 said:
I am a real human and you must be one of the asses who are making a joke of this… it’s a serious problem and needs to stop.. including your idiotic reaponses
Click to expand...
Taking as a given that you are a human, you could easily find the threads here that discuss this exact problem. You could also easily observe that POA members are generally not the people meowing on guard. You may even notice that POA members have a sarcastic streak, especially in response to the increasingly common posts that were obviously written by an AI LLM. Your posts in this thread, by the way, show a clear difference between those that you wrote and those that you had AI write. Any reasonable person who reads POA would expect this reaction.

The questions we all really want to ask are: What is your goal in posting this thread? How does your thread move the ball toward that goal?
 
You know what's gotta stop more than meowing on guard?

... New threads about meowing on guard.

If you're gonna have an angry take on something, at least make it something novel. Not something where we have 100000000 posts already about the topic.
 
iamtheari said:
This thread makes me feel better about myself. I thought I was the only one who actually used em-dashes on a daily basis. I have struggled to adjust my own writing to distance it from LLM-generated text.
Click to expand...

and I feel worse... I have no clue what an "em-dash" is. However, the extent to which I don't care is evident from the fact that I won't even bother to google it.
 
People who go on these rants are probably the same people I see videos of running a woman a woman off the road and giving her a tune up next to the interstate because her driving "could have killed someone" but more than likely just simply annoyed you.
 
Bob Noel said:
and I feel worse... I have no clue what an "em-dash" is. However, the extent to which I don't care is evident from the fact that I won't even bother to google it.
Click to expand...
Basically, and speaking from extensive personal experience, when you write too many words because you know that, while brevity is the soul of wit, you are just not a witty person, it’s important to have more types of punctuation to choose from rather than just commas, semicolons, colons, parentheses, and periods—so you end up needing to use dashes, and the proper dash to use in many places ends up being the em-dash, as opposed to the narrower en-dash or the very different Dash-8; but, at the end of the day, what you really need is to learn how to write shorter sentences. But I digress.
 
iamtheari said:
This thread makes me feel better about myself. I thought I was the only one who actually used em-dashes on a daily basis. I have struggled to adjust my own writing to distance it from LLM-generated text.
Click to expand...
I don't write like LLMs &emdash; LLMs write like me.
 
What do folks expect to happen if they simply do not monitor guard? Some sort of mass casualty event that would have been avoided if only they had been able to reach Bob in his 172 for his input on how to handle the situation?
 
Dixiebluesky said:
What do folks expect to happen if they simply do not monitor guard? Some sort of mass casualty event that would have been avoided if only they had been able to reach Bob in his 172 for his input on how to handle the situation?
Click to expand...
Hang around on guard long enough and you’ll get called when ATC misses giving you a freq change prior to flying out of range of one controller
 
Pugs said:
Hang around on guard long enough and you’ll get called when ATC misses giving you a freq change prior to flying out of range of one controller
Click to expand...
Or a Fighter Jet is off your wing because you missed the NOTAM for a TFR. In FL there are a lot of blind calls to planes about to blunder into active restricted areas. Not excusing anything, but another good reason to have guard on com 2
 
T Bird said:
I read this a lot here and elsewhere but in my somewhat limited experience (about 270 hours) when I monitor 121.5 pretty much all I hear is communication about missed handoffs and even that’s somewhat rare, it’s mostly silence. I’ve actually never heard a meow or other bullsh*t on frequency…
Click to expand...
You have to get close to the rj pilots.
 
I have not seen a single instance where a "Meow" has blocked or stepped on a "May Day, May Day, May Day or a Pan, Pan, Pan". So, the Meow has more people listening on 121.5 than before. Meowing has actually improved safety!
 
Dixiebluesky said:
What do folks expect to happen if they simply do not monitor guard? Some sort of mass casualty event that would have been avoided if only they had been able to reach Bob in his 172 for his input on how to handle the situation?
Click to expand...

A member of PoA ditched in the ocean in very inhospitable waters and was rescued because another pilot monitoring guard heard his last minute mayday call and notified the Coast Guard. I will not say who. But I suspect he or she would consider this comment profoundly stupid.
 
Hang 4 said:
Or a Fighter Jet is off your wing because you missed the NOTAM for a TFR. In FL there are a lot of blind calls to planes about to blunder into active restricted areas. Not excusing anything, but another good reason to have guard on com 2
Click to expand...
Dutifully monitoring guard on my second-ever solo, and first solo out of the pattern and into the practice area - I heard someone calling to "whomever is entering the restricted area turn around immediately". Being that the KFDK practice area is immediately adjacent to the Camp David airspace which expands to a much wider restricted area when VIPs are present, my blood ran cold as I checked my surroundings to double check exactly where I was. Turns out there was a TFR near Wilmington at the time, but for a minute it had me second guessing my briefing check that morning and imagining my upcoming conversation with my CFI.

So anyway, 121.5 is great to really send ice down the spine of student pilots by putting "This is the United States Air Force..." directly into their headsets.
 
Last edited:
Yeah yeah yeah. If you find yourself out of range and for the one in a million chance you haven't been contacted by a closer/higher aircraft to switch you, simply put in 21.5 at that time. I promise you the meows will not be so constant that you would be unable to take care of what needs to be taken care of.

There is no legitimate reason anybody should be flying into a TFR. The notion is that the current frequency you are talking to lets a person fly into a TFR and somehow being on 21.5 is the fix? They are the same people.

If you are flying and the noise on 21.5 is filling you with rage and consuming your thoughts the prudent flyer would simply not monitor.

I would like to be shown a single instance where there was legit communication going on and other pilots were just constantly keying up to meow over the aircraft and facility trying to communicate.

Internet flying is weird.
MEOW
 
Dixiebluesky said:
Yeah yeah yeah. If you find yourself out of range and for the one in a million chance you haven't been contacted by a closer/higher aircraft to switch you, simply put in 21.5 at that time. I promise you the meows will not be so constant that you would be unable to take care of what needs to be taken care of.

There is no legitimate reason anybody should be flying into a TFR. The notion is that the current frequency you are talking to lets a person fly into a TFR and somehow being on 21.5 is the fix? They are the same people.

If you are flying and the noise on 21.5 is filling you with rage and consuming your thoughts the prudent flyer would simply not monitor.

I would like to be shown a single instance where there was legit communication going on and other pilots were just constantly keying up to meow over the aircraft and facility trying to communicate.

Internet flying is weird.
MEOW
Click to expand...
That's catty.
 
Dixiebluesky said:
There is no legitimate reason anybody should be flying into a TFR. The notion is that the current frequency you are talking to lets a person fly into a TFR and somehow being on 21.5 is the fix? They are the same people.
Click to expand...
It's great to be perfect. TFR's sometimes pop up with very short notice. If AH's can't control themselves on a frequency, that seems to be more of their issue.
 
tsts4 said:
...please point me to the instance where someone meowing directly contributed to or caused a safety incident.
Click to expand...
SkyChaser said:
I don't think the people who do are causing planes to fall from the sky or creating an egregious safety hazard.
Click to expand...
A1Topgun said:
I have not seen a single instance where a "Meow" has blocked or stepped on a "May Day, May Day, May Day or a Pan, Pan, Pan".
Click to expand...

Oh no--looks like red herring on the menu again.

In a previous thread about this topic, I contributed two posts regarding this issue: 1st post; 2nd post.

The most disturbing aspect of this issue is that these abuses are largely committed by persons who are supposed to be professionals, and what that sad fact implies.
 
Last edited:
Roger Wilco said:
Oh no--looks like red herring on the menu again.

In a previous thread about this topic, I contributed two posts regarding this issue: 1st post; 2nd post.

The most disturbing aspect of this issue is that these abuses are largely committed by persons who are supposed to be professionals, and what that sad fact implies.
Click to expand...
I turned off all emergency alerts on my phone years ago, after I got sick of the boy crying wolf, mostly in the form of Silver Alerts for people just trying to get away from their annoying families for a moment of peace, hundreds of miles away. A big risk of people abusing Guard is that pilots will not monitor it because it interferes with their safety of flight. The lack of professionalism is also concerning.

However, I stand by my earlier post here: Other than sarcasm, what do people expect POA members to do with yet another post on this same subject? By and large, we aren’t the problem and aren’t anywhere near the levers of power that can solve or diminish it.
 
I just like to argue and enjoy a good 21.5 thread meow and then.

Sometimes a guy can be flying along at night think things are pretty dead on the air, meow might be a good time to meow on guard. Then you may get meows from a few other airplanes or even a bark from the guy that just has to be different.
 
dmspilot said:
The "It's not A. It's not B. It's C" pattern appears twice in one post
Click to expand...

Looks like a classic chain e-mail/early Facebook post. "Forward this to 3 of your friends!"
 
What if the cat noises are really some kind of important secret code? Like blinking 'torture'. Or maybe to let other pilots know that there are people from greenpeace or the knights templar or some other nutty group watching, so they don't turn on the contrails. Or their imaginary but audible emotional support animal. I've met more than one pilot that could use an imaginary support animal.

It's probably worth of a couple of 2 hour dateline specials, and maybe a law or two to require all radios be programmed to not let anyone speak a noise that sounds like a cat. Yeah, that'll do it...more rules will fix anything, just like... What color is sarcasm? OP is a genius.
 
billsgs126

Thread 'Sarcasm'

Being completely bilingual . . . English and Sarcasm . . . I sometimes get called out by those who are not understanding the difference. In order to be clear, I am looking for pointers on differentiating the two. Some people here use " /s " while I am of the :rolleyes: school. Is there a convention or norm here or in general?
 
I wonder if all this stuff started when the FAA published and maintained FDC NOTAM 4/4386 (often referenced alongside AIM 5-6-2) requires that all aircraft operating in United States national airspace, if capable, shall maintain a listening watch on VHF guard 121.5 or UHF 243.0.
 
Dixiebluesky said:
Sometimes a guy can be flying along at night think things are pretty dead on the air, meow might be a good time to meow on guard. Then you may get meows from a few other airplanes or even a bark from the guy that just has to be different.
Click to expand...
Well well well...it seems that this thread has, at the very least, led to a confession.

I could maybe forgive that kind of behavior from a 13-year-old, or even a 16-year-old after a bongload of good weed. But not from someone exercising the privileges, and bearing the responsibilities, of a pilot certificate.
 
Albany Tom said:
Or maybe to let other pilots know that there are people from greenpeace or the knights templar or some other nutty group watching, so they don't turn on the contrails
Click to expand...

That discussion needs to be moved to the classified subforum. Mods, can you assist? Please do not divulge the meaning of chemtrail meow codes in the open; they are still TS/NOFORN.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top