It’s no secret that air traffic controllers have a sucko job. Actually, if you ask them, its a very cool and exciting one–just not something that can one can be expected to do ten hours a day, six days a week which is the amount of hours they’re forced to put in. If you think about it, it’s really quite a brilliant craft they practice. Alas, it’s an exhausting and thankless one as well–they’re expected to perform perfectly at all times and thus given no special commendations for doing so. They only get mentioned when one of them is held responsible for an air mishap. Anyway, one of their greatest contributions to our culture, besides not getting us killed when we takeoff and land, is the language and delivery they’ve developed in their communications with pilots. I’ve been studying aviation of late and trying to decode the language exchanged by pilots and ATC while trying to keep up with the obscure terms and the fast-paced delivery is nearly impossible. While looking around Youtube for something that could be of some help to me, I stumbled upon the video I’ve posted above. It doesn’t do the job I was looking for, but it offers something very different and valuable. It’s ten hours of ATC chatter. Far from proving to be an exhausting array of instructions though, it is in fact an oddly soothing soundtrack of murmured words that you can’t understand, muted microphones going on and off while a background audio buzz blankets the whole thing. The person who posted it offers it as a soothing sleep-inducer, perfect white noise for putting you to bed and keeping you asleep. This doesn’t sound possible does it? After all, aren’t ATC workers all worked up and tense? Are we going to hear about near misses? How will this affect our dreams/nightmares? Oddly, the person who posted this is correct–putting this twelve-hour marathon of ATC low-audio chatter (their are huge gaps with no talk at all) on before going to bed really will help lull you to sleep. And damned if I haven’t been waking up less during the night since discovering this video. Try it–you’ll like it.