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American Airlines Airman: "I swear it's a prank!"
Photo: Caroline Brehman/EPA
It sounds like a moan of pain coming from the plane's loudspeakers: American Airlines is struggling with strange noises that were probably heard on at least one flight.
A passenger recorded what was happening, and his video was later shared thousands of times on social media.
Emerson Collins reported in the video that the noise could already be heard when the plane took off.
Again and again on his flight there were sometimes creepy, sometimes funny vocalizations.
"I swear it's a prank!" a flight attendant says to Collins at one point in the recording.
A colleague later apologizes for the “extremely irritating noise”.
The pilots worked to shut them down.
However, as soon as the flight attendant stops speaking, there is a loud “Ho!” and another moan.
Passengers don't seem to let this unsettle them.
Collins himself finds the noise "amusing," as he notes in the video.
He also tried to fathom its origin himself, he told the Washington Post.
He expected that in a space as limited as an airplane, it shouldn't be difficult to find out the cause.
But: "Of course I didn't see anything," said Collins.
There are said to have been similar incidents on other flights: Several users reported their experiences under Collins Post on Twitter.
"That happened to me last week," writes one user.
"A loud "Oh yeah" as we landed." Another user says a similar thing happened on her flight from New York to Texas.
"It was Flight 117," she wrote on Twitter.
“The crew were traveling on the same plane a few days earlier when the same thing happened.
It was funny and disturbing."
Mechanical problem as cause?
A spokeswoman for American Airlines confirmed that the airline was investigating the cause of the noise.
A team examined the affected aircraft.
"The noise was caused by a mechanical problem," the Washington Post said in a statement.
A faulty amplifier turned the volume up too high while the plane's engines were running.
Reports of further incidents would now be checked.
Emerson Collins is meanwhile certain that it cannot be a purely technical problem.
"The comedic timing of the sounds just seemed too planned to be a technical glitch."
lmd
