Is it possible to listen to old ATC tapes on the net?
 

Wanting to listen to tapes from Madrid tower, other than asking company to pull the tapes are there any web hosts recording them for private reviews?

Don't know about Madrid, but Googling 'ATC recordings archive' produces 123K results - I'll let you trawl your way through them.

FWIW, my personal opinion is that they should not be made available to the public. As an ATCO once said to me at Heathrow, 'the public have the right to know, but no NEED to know'.

If its just general interest you could try 'Live ATC' and have a sniff around there. There is a forum on there where there are hundreds of archived tapes that individuals have put on there. They also might have a 'live' feed to that tower - have a look.

Tapes where I worked were kept for a certain period (30 days?) and then re-used. In the event of an incident the tapes were retained for transcript but they, too, were re-used after a certain period.

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Tapes where I worked were kept for a certain period (30 days?) and then re-used. In the event of an incident the tapes were retained for transcript but they, too, were re-used after a certain period.

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Ah! the days of ATC tapes and 8 track cassettes in cars!

It's all digital these days, at most units computers do it all and I think that there is no shelf life of a recording these days, I don't actually know what happens to them but I imagine that they're backed up and kept in a broom cupboard somewhere.

^^^

Our digital system uses re-recordeable dvds which are swapped out every 30 days. There's half a dozen discs, so at any given time there would 6 months worth of recordings there. But that's not the end of it, the computer that writes on the disc has a hard disc in it that backups up everything. It over writes old info when there is no capacity left rather than after a time. This means the quantity recorded could, and does, go back a couple of years.

I'd imagine this is a pretty standard set up in most units these days.