Campus Soundtrack: The Jet Engine Thinks It’s a Bell

There are moments on campus when conversation stalls, not because ideas run out, but because an unseen jet engine decides to whirr louder than everyone else. 

The sound begins as a faint vibration and then swells into a hair-raising roar overtaking everything. Laptop screens tremble, water bottles skitter across desks and professors’ voices vanish beneath the drone. As always, heads tilt upward in confusion, scanning the empty sky and glancing downward at the watch in their hand checking the time. 

Despite its invisibility, the phantom airplane affects Loyola’s daily image. At 1:29 on a random Tuesday afternoon, a lecture halts mid-sentence. At 3:47 on a slow Wednesday, the buzz begins just as concentration has settled in. At 10:12 on a midterm morning, the roar stretches so long that a metaphysics class testing on the unreliability of time felt they had been handed proof. 

A noise like this should impose order — instead, it punctuates the day with chaos. 

What makes the phantom airplane so maddening is its unpredictability. Most sounds have timetables — the Red Line barrels past on schedule and the shuttle growls down Sheridan with alleged 30 minute predictability. 

The phantom seems to obey no clock, sounding as though it wants to mark the hour, but has forgotten which one. Nor is the droning mercifully brief. These aren’t quick flyovers — they are the sounds of full-blown transatlantic departures taxiing down to the quad. 

Entire lectures are swallowed whole by the sound, powerpoint slides hang in suspended animation and professors develop a resigned mime routine, scribbling notes while their words are devoured by the invisible jetstream. 

Naturally, speculation has flourished. Perhaps, Loyola is quietly hosting a new aviation school. Perhaps O’Hare has outsourced its overflow flights to Damen Avenue. Perhaps an avant-garde student composer has embedded a nearly never-ending concerto in the sky itself. 

Reactions are varied but rarely calm. Students roll their eyes in weary recognition as pigeons scatter, convinced the quad has become a runway. Faculty exchange the look of people who have already fought this battle and surrendered. 

Adaptation has been clumsy but inventive. Earbuds are clutched like lifelines though the vibrations seep through anyway. Groups migrate in search of quieter study spaces landing in the basement of Cudahy Library, only to discover the phantom follows them. The continuous buzz trails in the air. 

Some students attempt humor, filming as the phantom engine circled 105 times on the day Loyola’s sky mistook itself for a cathedral clock gone haywire. Others embrace the absurdity more literally — a small contingent has begun bringing orange cone vests to class, waving their arms as though guiding an incoming Dreamliner into the Information Commons. 

But satire aside, the cost is real. Consternation fragments, meetings dissolve and the academic calendar itself bends to the will of the turbines — life is measured less in semesters than in the gaps between takeoffs. Days are divided into “before engine” and “after engine,” with silence never lasting long enough to be trusted. 

The request is modest, predictability in the engines alleged 15 minute increments. A set schedule would suffice — a quick engine burst at every 15 minutes of time passing and a sassy bang at the top of each hour marking time without erasing it. Even a message notification can help, “Invisible flight 1:29 is now boarding in Cudahy. Please prepare for turbulence.” 

With predictability, the noise could be endured, a Pavlovian response to the jump in time. Without it, the community remains hostage to an aircraft that never lands. 

Nothing leaves as deep an impression as the phantom airplane, its roar capable of swallowing entire days. It interrupts, unsettles and lingers long after silence returns.

And when it comes  — as it always does — it’s less a reminder of time than a suspension of it, circling endlessly above a campus that never asked for takeoff.