Public address protocol in general seems to be an area of great intrigue among fliers, and perhaps understandably. That disconnected drawl coming over the speakers is often your only glimpse into the personality and character of the fellow to whom your life has been entrusted. Often that voice is all you get. On larger planes the cabin is so long and the cockpit so physically remote that a majority of passengers, having surrendered their fates for eight, 10 or 15 hours at a time, may never lay eyes on the cockpit crew at all.

It varies from carrier to carrier, but guidelines do exist outlining the acceptable tone and content of crewmember announcements. You'll find stipulations against personal opining, and against discussions of politics and religion. Sayeth your General Operations Manual, Chapter 7, Verse 12: Jokes, off-color innuendo, or slurs of any kind are forbidden. (Although Southwest seems to have a slightly different take, which actually requires pilots and flight attendants to make jokes over the P.A.)

In general, though, thou shalt maintain only the most generic and nonconfrontational rapport, lest the Chief Pilot summon and smite thee. (I strongly advocate the recitation of college football scores be added to the list of prohibitions, but that's just me.)

In practice, of course, it's all very informal, and pilots have more important things on their minds than the rulebook technicalities of P.A. announcements. It's not the sort of thing one rehearses during simulator training. Engine fires and hydraulic failures are what a pilot worries about, not whether his microphone demeanor is meeting the small print of some obscure page in one of his manuals. At the end of the day it all comes down to common sense.

The rules also restrict -- and not without good intentions -- the use of potentially frightening language or alarming buzzwords. Taken out of context, the invocation of something like "wind shear" or "icing" is liable to have passengers weeping. One airline I worked for had a policy banning any announcement that began with the words, "Your attention please."

"Your attention please. Southeastern Nebraska Tech has just kicked a last-minute field goal to pull ahead of North Southwestern Methodist State, 31-28."

Another no-no is launching into complicated, jargon-rich explanations. The vernacular of aviation contains enough acronyms and technical arcana to set anybody's head spinning. "Yeah, um, ladies and gentlemen, looks like Runway 04R at Kennedy just fell to less than an eighth. It's under 600 right now on all three RVR. They're calling it Cat-three, and we're only Cat-two up here, so, um, we're gonna do a few turns over the VOR, then spin around and shoot the ILS to 31L. They've got a 300 and a half over there."

Um.

To me, the important thing is to avoid overburdening people with information they can't use. Take the weather. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my hunch that nobody in row 36 cares that the wind in St. Louis is blowing from the southwest at 14 knots, and that the dew point is 57 degrees. They want to know if it's sunny, cloudy, rainy or snowy, and what the temperature is.

But in their attempts to translate confusing terms and clarify complex situations, crews are known to lapse into a hokey kind of pilot-ese that leaves people both uninformed and suspicious. There can be a fine line between what's genuinely informative and what's been dumbed down to the point where it sounds silly. I'm loath to bash my brethren, frontline defenders of whatever respect happens to remain in this business, but to a great extent we're only as articulate as what we've got to work with, which in this case is an almost paranoid dictum against scaring people or messing with their minds.

Airlines do not have policies of concealment or misinformation, tough as that may be for some to accept. But in their attempts to allay confusion (frequently) and fear (always), they recommend, if not mandate, only the simplest, easy-language explanations. This approach is totally out of whack with something as immense and intricate as our air system, and for as long as patronizing baby talk remains the procedure, distrust will continue to breed. Instances of cockpit-to-cabin awkwardness are, at least sometimes, symptoms of this greater dysfunction.

Making everything worse is the transfer of information between departments. When the weather turns foul or something goes wrong, the details are often passed from one team of workers to another, each with its own set of terminology and patois. The particulars of a given delay might be handed along from air traffic control to dispatchers to gate staff to crew before you're given the bad news. Then it's the pilot's duty to turn that mangle into something that's not overly technical or scary, yet also accurate and informative.

Better, maybe, just to talk about Jesus.

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected since its original publication.

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