Surely the Wireless Telegraphy Act (if correctly quoted above, which I imagine is the case) is drafted in such a way as to protect people from being bugged or being eavesdropped upon without their knowledge. That seems to be its point. It is not aviation-specific legislation and surely cannot be applicable to broadcast communications that are unencrypted and available to anyone and everyone with a standard VHF receiver. I cannot believe that this law would therefore apply to people simply listening in to ATC. You’ll note of course that the law as quoted makes no mention of recording plain openly broadcast radio messages. It is silent on this. Perhaps another law applies to that, or not.
There are ATC recordings all over the web including in relation to sad aviation events, and even the British Army in their Apache Helicopters broadcasting unencrypted on VHF and getting in the way of my first chat with Lille Information a few days ago…
If I may: Other than in the UK, it’s not required to ask for any specific “service”. A request of “flight information service” to FIS (=flight information service) is superfluous.
Oh, and don’t state the QNH you’re on. ATC/FIS is supposed to give you the correct one anyway. AFAIK, this practice is only taught in the UK.
The UK is conspicuous by its absence on LiveATC.net…..presumably due to legalities…
Boscomantico wrote:
If I may: Other than in the UK, it’s not required to ask for any specific “service”. A request of “flight information service” to FIS (=flight information service) is superfluous.
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I don’t understand the inferred criticism…It is not required to ask for any specific service in the UK…. You will be asked “what service do you require” if you are in radio contact OCAS with ATC or Info…. You could just have just as well not contacted anyone and so not ask or receive any service… But you only get asked which service because the uk there are additional services available OCAS such as traffic and Deconfliction….
Exactly. In the UK, there ar different types of services. Hence, upon initial contact, you have to state what type of service you want; otherwise, you will be asked (which comes down to the same thing).
Elsewhere in Europe, this is not the cae. You either decide to call and stay in radio contact with FIS, or you don’t. The words “request flight information service” are superfluous clutter-up of the frequency
Fair enough….and you can’t even listen in on LiveATC to get used to UK R/T!!
The UK is conspicuous by its absence on LiveATC.net…..presumably due to legalities
How is Liveatc implemented?
VHF range is too small to feed it off a receiver.
You could do eg London Information on 124.60 but almost nobody of relevance speaks to them.
Howard wrote:
You’ll note of course that the law as quoted makes no mention of recording plain openly broadcast radio messages.
Where I come from, visual and audio recordings of humans and our activities are covered by Civil Code (and it’s immaterial whether you were there or were just listening on a radio). While recordings of artwork (which includes architecture) are covered by a different law. Recording is one thing, publishing/ distributing it is another. There are plenty of things I can record for personal use, to refresh my memory. But I can’t publish them. Anything that embarrasses, portrays someone in a bad light, damages them would be a no. If I want to, I have to make sure that person cannot be identified. With some things, you can easily tell. Like a waiter tripping and splashing a cake on a customer. You can’t just go there the next day and see for yourself. Only the people that were there know. In other situations, you just don’t know. Because you’re missing some piece of information that someone else might have and when they see the picture (or whatever)… Like a picture of a car in front of a house. For all you know the house can belong to a lover of the guy that drives that car. And a week after publishing a friend of his wife can show it to her because the house is so pretty.
There have been some discussion about the Internet changing things and that privacy is no more. I think people should just stop publishing obscene amount of material without any regard for privacy of others. It can really wind me up. In the olden days, we shared these things with friends and family, much closer circle of people. And things got easily forgotten (you wouldn’t normally create copies for others). So the probability of doing real damage was much lower (although the actions were in many cases illegal just the same). And the Internet is not forcing people to publish everything for everyone to see.
Strange how different cultures are. The air frequencies are open frequencies, hence everybody can listen to them, it’s public domain so to speak, and no one “owns” the transmissions. They can be recorded and used for whatever purpose (within normal laws). To transmit however, requires a license. If you want to make it private, you have to actively do something, like encrypting the transmission. Everybody can still listen, but no one would understand anything, unless they know how to de-crypt it. But, to de-crypt encrypted transmissions is illegal.
Regarding the legality of listening in to ATC: Belgian law and jurisdiction take it on the same lines as opening and reading a letter that is not adressed to you. There has been a case of one convicted – a member of parliament who sympathised with a NIMBY group and published what he heard on his scanner.
talking to myself – the first sign of madness
Not at all. You just choose the wisest person near to talk to. (not my words, I quote them from linguistical genius JRRT)
