She's bossed around pilots every day for over 20 years.
“Bitchin’ Betty’s” real name is Leslie Shook, but many of the men and women whose lives she’s saved don’t know that.
Shook has been on every flight the F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter has flown since 1995, when the F-18 entered service — or at least her voice has.
Fighter jets, like most airplanes, have pre-recorded emergency messages and command prompts to call a pilot’s attention to aspects of the plane more urgently than a blinking light can. When Boeing was designing the F-18, many of the alert messages transferred over from its predecessor, the F-15, but they still needed to record more. Leslie Shook was a media producer for Boeing filling in as a sound engineer to record the sound bytes, but the hired voice talent wasn’t cutting it. The voice of the cockpit warning system had to be urgent, sharp, and commanding, Shook thought, and while she was demonstrating what she wanted, her manager overheard her. The fill-in sound director became the talent, as Shook became “Bitchin’ Betty,” the affectionate nickname fighter pilots give the disembodied voice of their plane’s warning system.
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WNU Editor: I suspect that for some pilots .... that is a voice that they will never forget.
1 comment:
A friend of mine's father flew a fighter in the Vietnam war and told his son that when all the bells and lights went off in the cockpit they shut the warning system off because it was too distracting.
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