Those who tell us to simply ignore the guard idiots obviously do not fly in Europe, or any other busy airspace. Twice today on a rotation to Rome, I missed calls from ATC because they were 'stepped on' by the audio from guard blotting out the audio from ATC.
In some places there is almost continuous chatter on Box 1 and if guard starts up it can be almost impossible to concentrate on either, so how do you ignore guard with it babbling into your ear?
So you turn guard down, or off just so you can concentrate on ATC. Why don't we simply turn it back on after a few mins? Well, because there is a psychological aspect to PLOC, and we don't always remember or notice that we have turned guard off. Meanwhile there is still chatter on box 1 so we think we are still in range with ATC.
This is why some sort of "121.5 NOT MONITORED" message would be useful, popping up after a couple of minutes.
The people who think it is amusing to make noises on guard, defy understanding. They have no respect, either for their profession or for anything else. If flying a modern jet bores them, then they have no right to be there. Also, by their actions they are tacitly demonstrating that they are not aware of what can go wrong. They have clearly never been in a bad situation: the sort where you suddenly think 'this could have a bad outcome'. If they had, they would respect the emergency channel.
The fact that folk can now get straight onto a modern jet after a few hundred hours total time, whereas previously we had to spend years flying aged turbo props and doing night mail runs etc. to earn our stripes does not help. Nor does the fact that some employers do not respect their staff and make them get up at 0300 five days in a row or work until 0200 and pay peanuts or don't pay them.
Last edited by Uplinker; 10th May 2016 at 05:51.