Why in‑flight announcements are always so hard to understand

Nick Broste, a musician and sound engineer, explained in an interview with a journalist from Thrillist why announcements on airplanes are difficult to understand. The explanation is quite simple.

Broste explains that a significant portion of the equipment used on airplanes is outdated or made of lightweight materials, which limits its durability.

- Aircraft manufacturers want to use very lightweight materials, so the speakers on airplanes are small and not very heavy, which means they do not have high fidelity and can easily become distorted - says Broste.

The problem also lies in the quality of the microphones used by the crew. Even though they are optimised for transmitting frequencies that are best heard for letters, numbers, and warning signals, they cannot capture a wide range of frequencies, leading to compressed and distorted sound. - What you hear is a very compressed signal, which is why the sound is so distorted - adds the expert.

An additional problem is the background noise you have to deal with while being on a plane at an altitude of several thousand feet. Combined with equipment limitations, this makes the announcements difficult to understand.

The third factor is the crew positioning the microphone too close to their mouth.

Broste explains that the sound is often distorted because the person is holding the microphone too close to their mouth. This effect can be compared to recording a voice note with the phone held close to the mouth, leading to a "muffled" sound effect.

Announcements on planes often become the topic of viral videos on TikTok, where passengers joke about the difficulty of understanding them. One internet user wrote, "The pilot announces something, and it sounds like he opened the window in the cockpit." Another added, "Why is there always so much static?"