Week 9 Sim Session: Degraded audio, and what the room heard

Comprehension at the edge, then the same clip again once you have been told what it says — which you cannot un-hear

5 May 2027

Priya is rostered away. Halvard runs it.

Audit domains must be cleared this week, so bring a candidate even if you are not sure about it.

In the session#

Degradation ladder, thirty minutes. The same set of clearances at three levels: clean, band-limited, and band-limited with noise. You write down what you copied and score yourself against the transcript afterwards.

Everybody’s score falls. What is interesting is how it falls: most people lose whole elements rather than degrading gracefully, and the element lost is usually the one carrying the least redundancy — a single digit, a runway suffix.

The replay, twenty minutes. This is the part worth being in the room for.

We take one clip that most of the room could not parse. Halvard tells you what it says. We play it again.

It is now perfectly clear. It will never be unclear again. You have just watched your own priors get installed, and you cannot uninstall them.

That is expectation bias, demonstrated on yourself rather than described. It is also, precisely, the mechanism behind the hearback failures you measured in week 3 — and the reason the Air Canada 759 crew heard an answer to their question.

Party line exercise, twenty-five minutes. Everybody on one frequency, several exchanges running. You are given a task that has nothing to do with your own clearances: report anything you hear that concerns another aircraft and sounds wrong.

The room catches things. It catches similar callsigns, a readback that did not match, an aircraft accepting a clearance meant for somebody else. Nobody transmitted any of that to you.

Then we run the same exercise with each student on a separate frequency, hearing only their own exchanges. The catches go to zero. That is the party line’s value, measured rather than asserted, and it is the number week 10 should make you uncomfortable about.

Audit domain clearance#

Last fifteen minutes, individually. Bring: the domain, who speaks, what the channel is, and how you will get evidence.

The most common rejection is a domain with no pressure in it, and the second most common is one you cannot ethically observe. Both are easier to fix now than in week 11.

Afterwards#

Keep your degradation scores. They go alongside your week 2 confusion list and your week 3 catch rate — three numbers about yourself, which is what week 11 asks you to be honest about when you write findings about somebody else.