One of the few benefits of the extended time we’ve all spent at home in the past couple of years due to the COVID-19 pandemic is that we have more time to explore answers to questions we may have just discarded previously.
While mowing my lawn a few months back I started thinking about an intersectionality between two of my interests, aviation and audio. A big topic of discussion between pilots is the headsets they utilize in flight, features, capabilities, and the protection they provide against the high noise levels pilots experience in flight. I chewed on this, spoke with a friend of mine who’s an expert of SPL induced hearing damage, and started doing some research. I ended up in my attic doing at-home data collection to back up what I was reading, and the results started to make sense.
I decided that my findings were useful, and that it might be nice if people had a resource written by a pilot for pilots about the real dangers of noise induced hearing loss, so I drafted a short article. The folks at AOPA Flight Magazine were nice enough to pick it up and publish it. You can check it out at the link below.