Teller1900
En-Route
I know it's always a good idea to maintain a listening watch on guard. But with the requirement in the type of flying I do to also monitor company/FBO frequencies, check ahead for the weather, etc, we often don't have time or simply forget to pull up the guard frequency. But this week, I got a good reminder in why we do it, even if it increases workload a little bit.
So there we were, cruising along up in the flight levels, fat dumb and happy. We were out over western Colorado on our way to Napa, so the frequency was expectedly quiet. With little activity on the ATC frequencies, I bothered to put guard up on 2. And not a minute too soon.
It hadn't even been five minutes. We were talking amongst ourselves and fighting with an intermittently unresponsive A/C pack when I heard a very quiet "Company 173 [our callsign], American 123, how do you hear?"
Fortunately he repeated it three or four times, as it took me several seconds to figure out which radio he was transmitting on. As it turns out, he was transmitting on guard after another aircraft's attempt at a relay on the Denver Center frequency failed.
Thanks to the relay from American we quickly established communications with Salt Lake Center, and carried on without further incident. Turns out, since we were on a direct-to clearance and not an airway, Denver lost us sooner than he had expected. But, had we not had 21.5 up in the other radio, who knows how far we would have made it before realizing that Denver Center wasn't just quiet that day.
So there we were, cruising along up in the flight levels, fat dumb and happy. We were out over western Colorado on our way to Napa, so the frequency was expectedly quiet. With little activity on the ATC frequencies, I bothered to put guard up on 2. And not a minute too soon.
It hadn't even been five minutes. We were talking amongst ourselves and fighting with an intermittently unresponsive A/C pack when I heard a very quiet "Company 173 [our callsign], American 123, how do you hear?"
Fortunately he repeated it three or four times, as it took me several seconds to figure out which radio he was transmitting on. As it turns out, he was transmitting on guard after another aircraft's attempt at a relay on the Denver Center frequency failed.
Thanks to the relay from American we quickly established communications with Salt Lake Center, and carried on without further incident. Turns out, since we were on a direct-to clearance and not an airway, Denver lost us sooner than he had expected. But, had we not had 21.5 up in the other radio, who knows how far we would have made it before realizing that Denver Center wasn't just quiet that day.