Airline pilots hear baby cries

Airline pilots hear baby cries

Visiting engineers looked “like Ghostbusters”
A baby monitor has been blamed for causing radio interference at Luton airport.
The monitor, used by Lisa Spratley from Stopsley in Bedfordshire, for her baby Freya, blocked the airport’s radio signals to incoming planes.

This meant pilots heard the sound of her baby crying rather than landing instructions.

The first thing Mrs Spratley knew of the problem was when two engineers arrived at her house, just three miles from the airport.

She said: “They said they were working on behalf of Luton airport traffic control.

“They’d been asked to sort out interference they’d been receiving on the airwaves and they had tracked it down to our address.”

Safety unaffected

Using an aerial and receiver, the engineers from the Radio Communications Agency (RCA) traced the problem to the baby monitor in Freya’s bedroom.

They told Mrs Spratley they had experienced the same problem nearly five years earlier with a few monitors that happened to be near airports.

In a statement, the RCA said that once the problem was identified it took them 12 hours to track down the source.

In the meantime, they changed to another frequency and added that safety was not compromised.