Tony writes:

One human factor that's been overlooked -- on late night flights, it is
often very very quiet aloft. I like the sound of a human voice from
time to time, it's reassuring to know the coms are working. Listening
in on aircraft to aircraft frequencies, and chatting as well, is I
think a safety factor. Pilots who make long cross country flights will
understand the reality of my point , others may appreciate at least the
theory.

It could even be a factor for sim pilots gaming a flight.

It is. It's always a bit eerie to be the only living soul around with
a radius of a hundred miles. Just driving a car alone on a deserted
highway can do this, especially in the western U.S., where some
highways can look uncannily like the deserted road in the old movie
posters for _Close Encounters of the Third Kind_, which definitely
does not help at all. I think being in a small aircraft can only
magnify this feeling.

I wonder how astronauts in the command modules of Apollo flights to
the moon must have felt while thousands of miles away from their
colleagues on the opposite side of the planet. They didn't even have
a radio to listen to.

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