Aviation Humor

About ten years ago, when I was a student pilot in Gimli, Manitoba I went on a school arranged tour of the Winnipeg tower facility. I got talking with one of the controllers who related this story to me:

Apparently the controllers were getting really annoyed with the Air Canada pilots who regularly flew into Winnipeg. It would seem that the source of the irritation was the tone of voice that these guys were using. They would come on the frequency with the deepest voices you could imagine, saying things like 'This is Air Canada 345 heavy by the Whiskey for runway 18'.

One of the controllers finally had had enough of this sort of affectation and decided to get even one day. He went out and bought a bunch of helium filled balloons… Sure enough, the first Air Canada flight to arrive in the airspace checked in with the big deep pilot voice. The controller took a huge honk of the helium and cleared the flight to land in a voice akin to Donald duck wearing very tight shorts!

No one seemed sure how the pilots reacted, but it gave the controllers one heck of a high!