When were you aware that you’re famous in the ATC world? He agreed to speak with me by phone and chatted about his unlikely fame, how he thinks the air traffic control system could be fixed, and, perhaps most importantly, why we should not be afraid to fly. With our nation’s air traffic control system facing a new and intense level of scrutiny, I immediately wanted to know what Kennedy Steve had to say about it. With his slight Long Island accent, he sounds like the kind of New York character one might expect to see helping the cops solve a crime in a Law & Order episode. His voice and demeanor are instantly distinguishable to frequent listeners. Stephen Abraham, or “Kennedy Steve,” as he’s known on the ATC tape circuit, was an air traffic controller at JFK airport for more than 20 years. Shockingly, this world of faceless, fragmented radio conversations produced an actual celebrity. Sometimes, these tapes also come with delightful Irish pilots, or an alien conspiracy, or a teenage girl being talked through an emergency landing. Most ATC conversations are wonderfully dull - simply an opportunity to hear how many working professionals there are who are heavily invested in your flight not being a catastrophe. The audience spans all manner of people: former pilots and controllers, general aviation nerds, and people like me, who just want to know how my plane works because I’m really afraid of it crashing. Though niche, these tapes do serious numbers: Two of the biggest channels, VASAviation and WorldAviation 4K, boast 536,000 and 232,000 subscribers respectively, and compilations get millions of views. A far cry from mildly erotic ASMR videos or thrilling video-game playthroughs, ATC tapes are a series of grainy, often garbled radio conversations between pilots and the air traffic control towers that tell them where to go, usually played back over a crude animation of a plane on a map. Of all the corners of YouTube to end up in, perhaps the most wholesome and unbelievably strange is that of air traffic controllers. Because it’s a big sky, and the planes are really small.”
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