ATC
United Airlines has a great feature where they let you listen to the radio communications between the plane and the air traffic controller. I don't fly on United very often because it seems expensive compared to airlines like Southwest and JetBlue, but whenever I fly United, I find this feature endlessly fascinating. You can predict what your flight is going to do, because certain actions are almost never taken without instructions from the ATC (like significant altitude changes).
(Pretty much all of my assertions about aviation below are based on my experiences listening to the radio during flights; some of them might be wrong, since I don't have any formal aviation training and am not a pilot.)
There's a whole jargon and set of conventions used in communications between pilots and the ground. For example, there are all the phrases like "climb and maintain flight level X", rules about how to address planes and how to identify yourself, ways to instruct a pilot to contact a different controller, and so on. You can pick up quite a lot of it quickly by listening to the various towers encountered on a transcontinental flight or two. And it's really fun to know when your plane is about to go up or down or turn.
At least in some parts of the world, the pilots and the controllers have a really endearing habit of saying "good day" to one another, which originally made me wonder if they were all Australian. (They're not.) They also like to call one another "sir" and "ma'am". They're very polite and very, very terse.
The main activity of pilots at cruising altitude on long flights, at least during days with substantial "chop", seems to be changing altitudes to avoid turbulence. It's not permitted to change altitudes without prior permission, so pilots have to figure out exactly what altitude they want, and then request it. If the altitude is available, the tower will usually allow the requesting pilot to take it. Different altitudes at a single location will have dramatically different amounts of "chop", and the level turbulence at a particular place will be fairly steady at a particular altitude for what is apparently a period of several hours.
Therefore, pilots are always giving each other reports, and asking for reports, about what (empirically) the flying conditions are like along various routes at various altitudes. If one pilot says an altitude is good, other pilots following behind will want to use that altitude; if a pilot says an altitude is very choppy, other pilots will want to avoid it.
When pilots are concerned about turbulence, then, they want the controller to do work for them (inquiring about and tracking the weather conditions), but they need the controller's help and don't want to be pests. They're dependent on the controller's kindness and goodwill, since the controller could simply say that permission to climb or descend to a particular flight level was denied. The controller does not have to justify his or her decisions at all. The authority of the tower is quite profound, at least if pilots are operating under flight rules in which the tower has to approve their decisions.
So a pilot has a self-interested reason to want to ask for weather reports (and associated changes in altitude or flight path) as frequently as possible, but it would really irritate the tower if every pilot did so at every opportunity. The tower just wants to get rid of planes quickly and safely, and isn't extremely interested in how much turbulence particular planes experience -- mild turbulence is unlikely to cause any harm, but merely makes passengers uncomfortable.
The pilot and the tower have a mutual interest in having a good working relationship, and so the pilot tries to be friendly to the tower by controlling the frequency of requests, and the tower tries to be friendly to the tower by researching weather conditions and granting requests whenever possible. This informal negotiation is very interesting. Imagine it were your job to approve requests, and it didn't cost you anything but your time to do so. But many, many people depended on your approval, and were constantly clamoring for your attention. Managing these requests would be an intricate and challenging responsibility -- given that some of them are mutually incompatible -- and the requesters would quickly discover that it wasn't in their interest to annoy you, wouldn't they?
I wish that an anthropologist would do a study of the culture of air traffic control communications. It's a totally oral culture, it's a worldwide culture, it's a fairly old modern technical culture, and it has its own extensive jargon and is totally unfamiliar to most people. There are relatively very few participants, they deal with each other very frequently, and they might not even know one another's names. They would probably not recognize one another if they met on the street. They're partly accountable to various bureaucracies, but nobody can really tell them what to do. (Well, I guess Ronald Reagan can fire them all, which might count as telling them what to do.)
It would be interesting to read a description of the jargon and of the kinds of social practices which can occur in these terse, static-filled, utilitarian bursts of communication. Is there a subtext? Can pilots tell when the tower is annoyed or overworked? Is there an informal quid pro quo? Do participants even realize when they are participating in an exchange of value or power? Are there rivalries and friendships? Where did all of the jargon come from, and how do participants learn it?
My desire for that particular study reminds of other things I'm curious about, outside the fascinating world of ATC. I want someone to study the role of cranks, for example, in fields which are more contested and less contested. I should write something about cranks to explain more clearly what I mean.
