“[censored]in’ Betty” Says Farewell

[Eclipse]

Beloved Voice Behind Boeing's F/A-18 Super Hornet Retires

"Stern. Sharp. Bossy. All have been used to describe the voice of the Boeing F/A-18's cockpit warning system. The pilots and technicians refer to the voice as "[censored]in' Betty," a time-honored tradition that is also potentially life-saving."

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[Spam]

Great post, Eclipse.

When I worked at McDonnell (25 years or so ago), two of the senior human factors engineers related the story of finding a trained vocalist from Nashville to record "Pull UP", etc. in beautiful tones on a multiple track professional quality set of tapes from a studio, for the original "Betty". This was in the 1970s I believe, and the demo fed both the Eagle and the Hornet programs versions of "Betty". They brought the tapes back to St. Louis, handed them over to the avionics guys to digitize.. and a couple of weeks later they had unbelievably bandwidth-clipped harsh "PULL UP"s which sounded like the original by-your-command Cylons from Battlestar Galactica (this of course was the early days, and was pushing the art of digitized voice output). So, they decided to find a more permanent/affordable internal and local solution, who is now honorably retiring, I guess.  (Sources: R. Lenz/S. Levine/D. Baerthel, McDonnell Douglas - now McBoeing).

The "blankin' Betty" for the F-22 is a very talented avionics engineer who used to sit over the wall from me at Lockheed. She was honored by the Raptor pilots working group one day, and we teased her a bit over having thirty or so good looking fighter pilots all buying her drinks at the bar that night. She just grinned and wiggled her eyebrows!

Thanks for posting this!
Spam

[Brit_in_CAP]

 :clap: :clap:

Nice post--thanks for sharing and brightening my day!

[PHall]

And then there's B****in' Bob who sounds off in the GCAS (Whoop, Whoop, Pull Up!, Glidescope, Minimums Minimums, etc...).
Who has always sounded like Hal from 2001 to me. I always keep waiting for "I can't do that Dave."

[Eclipse]

GCAS (Whoop, Whoop, Pull Up!, Glidescope, Minimums Minimums, etc...).

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