Radio Chatter: A Look at LiveATC.net

BY SAM OLESON AIRVENTURE TODAY STAFF

WHAT ORIGINALLY BEGAN as a hobby for Dave Pascoe has grown into a fullfledged business and useful resource for pilots and aviation enthusiasts. LiveATC.net, founded by Dave in 2002, allows anyone to listen in to air traffic communications from around the United States, giving listeners a peek into what might be happening in the sky hundreds or thousands of miles away.

An electrical engineer by trade, Dave earned his pilot certificate in

2001 and then earned his instrument rating a year later. He was also involved in a Virtual Air Traffic Simulation Network (VATSIM) group at the time and thought that members of the group would enjoy listening to actual air traffic communications.

“I was an air traffic controller on VATSIM. We were a pretty serious group, the Boston Center group,” Dave said. “I was also a pilot on that network. As I was going through my instrument training, what happened there was I realized that a lot of people might want to listen to the communications that are going on. I found it not that difficult because I had a ham radio background. … Even though

I had a comfort of using a two-way radio because of the experience, I still found it challenging, the ATC lingo. In the beginning, it’s just all gibberish.”

Dave decided to place a couple of receivers at his brother’s house, in range of Boston’s Logan International Airport, and it went from there.

Currently, LiveATC has coverage of radio communications at close to 1,450 distinct airports, and typically there’s a few thousand people listening in at any given time.

“So we put those up on the internet. I knew how to do internet audio streaming at the time, which wasn’t huge, but certainly was out there in its early phases. I said, ‘Well, I want to share this with my VATSIM group so the other air traffic controllers [in the group] can listen in to how it’s really done.’ To get to the ‘as real as it gets’ thing, I’ll put a website out there, and we’ll just throw a couple streams up. Well, one thing led to another, and here we are today.”

Used by aviation enthusiasts, student pilots, flight simulation