Originally Posted by
FZRA
I fly commercially in and out of the UK regularly. Our SOP (and same across all airlines that I'm aware of) is 121.5 tuned on VHF2 at all times as a listening watch. However, all the practice pans can become particularly distracting (worse when being vectored in busy airspace, someone chatting away whilst you're trying to listen). It's not uncommon to end up switching off VHF2, and forgetting to switch it back on again. My non-UK colleagues find it baffling/annoying, seems predominantly a British thing.
Thoughts?
Non UK colleagues seem to think it's their exclusive air to air chat frequency and shouldn't be used for emergencies practice or real according to previous threads on this subject.