Audio system on board a passenger plane hijacked to play “annoying” groans throughout the flight

The incident reported on one American Airlines flight left passengers, flight attendants and pilots alike stunned, all having to endure the intermittent playback of obscene sounds through the system normally used to announce messages to the public.

Experience has been documented in a video that has since gone viral on the TikTok network, capturing the bizarre series of groans that could be heard on board the plane shortly before take-off, continuing throughout the flight.

The weirdest flight ever.
These sounds started over the intercom before takeoff and continued throughout the flight.
They couldn’t stop it, and after landing still had no idea what it was. pic.twitter.com/F8lJlZHJ63

– Emerson Collins (@ActuallyEmerson) September 23, 2022

“Ladies and gentlemen, we realize there is an extremely irritating sound over the public announcements,” says a flight attendant in the video. “The flight crew are trying to debug it, trying to disable it, so please bear with us, we know this is a very strange anomaly and none of us are enjoying it.”

Described as a combination of “orgasms and vomiting,” the moans transmitted at high volume over the plane’s intercom system could not be stopped until the flight was over, to the exasperation of all passengers on board. Even more interestingly, according to an American Airlines spokesperson, the PA systems “are connected and there is no external access.” In other words, they are a classic intercom system, consisting of microphones, audio amplifier and speakers arranged to cover most of the plane’s spaces.

For such a hoax to be possible, at least one of the system’s microphones would have to be in direct use, or at least connected to an audio playback source. Except that all points from which messages could have been transmitted were checked and immediately ruled out by crew members.

Apparently this wasn’t the only American Airlines flight to be subjected to strange noises. According to The Los Angeles Times, a passenger on a July flight from New York to Los Angeles reported similar sounds.