airtraffic

Author Topic: DL 107 Declares emergency, lands JFK.  (Read 16779 times)

Offline InterpreDemon

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DL 107 Declares emergency, lands JFK.
« on: September 11, 2012, 03:29:05 AM »
Dave and I have been testing a new dedicated ARINC receiver site on the south shore of Long Island that we hope to bring on line shortly, and the VOX recorder happened to be running when this one came in (attached).



Offline datainmotion

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Re: DL 107 Declares emergency, lands JFK.
« Reply #1 on: September 12, 2012, 04:09:04 PM »
Great catch! Receiver sounds good too.

Offline InterpreDemon

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Re: DL 107 Declares emergency, lands JFK.
« Reply #2 on: September 12, 2012, 10:32:40 PM »
We've only just begun, it will get a lot better. We've got an array pointed at the oceanic waypoints 250-280 miles out and are getting the aircraft pretty much full bore, but the problem is that the ARINC ground station apparently uses the same tight speech compression for the VHF as they do for the HF and on top of it there is lots of noise in their transmitter link... to the point where even close aircraft like that Delta flight, which was probably only fifty miles from JFK, have trouble understanding them. What sounds like a weak, noisy ground signal is actually close to pegging the meter on the radio since it is only eight miles abeam the yagi. I really do think they have a bad connection on the phone line. But we will prevail in the end.

Offline KC2555

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Re: DL 107 Declares emergency, lands JFK.
« Reply #3 on: September 13, 2012, 07:14:44 PM »
Are you speaking English? - Signed, A Newbie who has much to learn :)

Offline phil-s

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Re: DL 107 Declares emergency, lands JFK.
« Reply #4 on: November 24, 2012, 09:23:14 PM »
Looking back in the threads and saw this. Question: the whole oceanic HF com mess, couldn't this be done these days by sat link? Even a sat phone seems like it'd work better than what I'm hearing here. 50 miles out of JFK and they still can't communicate?  Anyway, thanks for posting.

Offline InterpreDemon

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Re: DL 107 Declares emergency, lands JFK.
« Reply #5 on: November 25, 2012, 11:20:33 PM »
It is rather bizarre, I agree. The pilot could easily have communicated directly with Delta maintenance on the ground at that point from either JFK or LGA, and I have heard patches to maintenance on those terminal frequencies. The only reason I can offer is that ARINC 129.9 works anywhere offshore from the Canadian Maritimes down to Chesapeake Bay, communicating through multiple zones via eight simulcast, slightly offset frequency transceivers (the reason those ground stations sound so crappy) AND the ARINC operators have all the phone numbers for their airline customers at their fingertips and can put the calls through immediately. The real question is why those ground stations sound like crap, and my own personal theory is that they 1) use speech processing at the ground operator console that is highly compressed and optimized for HF sideband communications in order to punch through noise and static not generally present on VHF and 2) perhaps cross-link their transmitter repeaters via daisy-chain, the audio getting progressively worse with each hop.

If you listen carefully to the ground transmissions on the 129.9 feed, the majority which are from JFK and we believe a few coming from Southampton fifty miles to the east, you will note that some of the transmissions, the ones I believe to be via repeater or cross-link, have about a one second dead carrier tail after the operator un-keys, often heterodyning with the subsequent pilot transmission if he keys up immediately. That heterodyne represents the -2.5kc offset of the JFK transmitter, which is actually transmitting on 129.8975. Southampton transmits 2.5kc higher on 129.9025. Cape Cod and Chesapeake are +7.5 and -7.5 repectively. Apparently airborne receivers certified for the ARINC system use synchronous detection and filtering to lock onto the strongest carrier received and notch out any heterodyne, which allows essentially single channel operation over a very large area.

The same system is used for the terrestrial ARINC coverage, for example 129.4 covers from the NE triangle from Wisconsin down to Chesapeake and up to Maine using a dozen ground stations and the same type of frequency offset simulcast scheme. In a triplet of recordings I posted almost two months ago here: http://www.liveatc.net/forums/atcaviation-audio-clips/typical-sfo-arinc-traffic/ I was able to reconstruct both sides of the conversations thanks to ground station archives recorded out of Boston, which is at present the only feed that captures any 129.4 transmissions from the ground. The aircraft were received at JFK from hundreds of miles away but could not be heard in Boston, and it is doubtful given their positions that ARINC was receiving them via Boston either, since the two of the three flights were almost over-top ARINC stations in Buffalo and Williamsport, and the third was halfway between Williamsport and another ARINC station in Baltimore. Thanks to the simulcast all the ground transmissions were repeated and captured in Boston.