It has nothing to do with ego, that's silly. A pilot with an inflated ego would WANT the passengers to hear the radio so as to impress them with his excellent radio technique.

There is a down side to "Ch.9" and that is that the technical phraseology used on the radio can often give a non-pilot the wrong impression about what is going on. UAL occasionally has problems with passengers who are scared because they hear something that they misinterpret. This is why the pilots would always want the ability to turn off the feature.

At my former job, a large commuter airline, I would occasionally see some of the complaint letters that were forwarded to my Chief Pilot. Whenever the complaint had to do with the flight department, customer relations would forward a copy to the appropriate Chief Pilot so that his input could be gathered. In most cases these complaints were laughable examples of a passenger who misinturpreted what was going on.

One good one was a passenger, apparently with some pilot training, complained that the crew of a metroliner didn't do their pre-takeoff checks. These checks are usually accomplished while the airplane is taxiing out. On small general aviation airplanes, like the passenger flew, they do these checks in a runup area after taxiing to the runway mainly because there is only one pilot and doing them while taxiing wouldn't be terribly safe. Anyway, this guy was really upset at this "safety violation" and pointed out that the pilots didn't even do a runup to "check the mags!" The mags are magnetos which provide the spark on a piston powered airplane. The metroliner is powered by two Garret TPE331 turoprop engines which, of course, has no mags. Trying to check the mags in a turboprop is like trying to change the oil on an electric weed-eater.

Anyway, I'm rambling. I have a few more of these stories if anyone is interested.

[This message has been edited by LarryJ (edited 09-14-2002).]