Nuclear air crash simulation reveals 'plain English' need

[ricardian]

A mock exercise in which a US aircraft carrying a nuclear weapon crashed over England has revealed the importance of "plain English", a report has found.
BBC report (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-36429111)

[Heathrow Harry]

the point of any exercise is to find the bits that don't work - not the ones that do..................

[MPN11]

Having spent much of my controlling life mixing USAF and RAF traffic ... I can't agree more.

"Divided by a common language" was never so true back then. That's why we had a USAF Maj/Lt Col at Eastern Radar to attempt to act as an interpreter, and why we used to visit the USAF Units in East Anglia to try to explain that there was no charge for simply saying "Pan, Pan, Pan" instead of "Hey Eastern, we have a problem request recovery ..."

My 'best' example was a TF-100 that had ejected off the Lincs coast east of Strubby back in '66, when I was on Approach. Guy in his parachute plaintively calling on his SARBE ... "This is Wiggins, anybody there?" <repeat> ... Fortunately the DF trace gave me a clue, I had a Dominie just airborne on Navex, so vectored him down the DF trace. Eventually Capt Wiggins was found and recovered, although sadly not his colleague.

Being 'standard' is boring, but at least it works.

[Yellow Sun]

I recall a very large NATO maritime exercise in the 80s, everything that wasn't a pro-word was in NUCO or NAMAT until an excited voice from a USN Reserve P3 came up with:

"Hey Valdez we got ourselves a submarine down here!!"

Well contact reports should be in clear shouldn't they.

YS;)

[Tankertrashnav]

NUCO?

NAMAT?

Sort of makes the point. Admittedly I have been out of the game for 40 years now but I frequently find the proliferation of abbreviations and acronyms on here makes some posts all but unintelligible. Fine for those in the know, but the OP is making the point that in many situations not everyone will be speaking the same language - even if they are all speaking English.

[Pontius Navigator]

NUCO/UNNUCO were certainly proword whereas NAMAT was not a proword.

TTN, as a NavRad, and a tanker one at that can be forgiven for not knowing his way around the arcane siggy world. It befell to me to give the first TriStar crew destined for Mount Pleasant a crash course in codes and authentication when they arrived at ASI, prior to that the Strat (T) force (?) had been immune to codes and tactical stuff

[PlasticCabDriver]

We used to provide a standby cover for US nuclear flights for scenarios exactly such as this.
Despite all the drills and instructions, I couldn't help feeling that what would actually happen is that just as we had got the cordons etc all set up the Americans would turn up, simply shoot everybody within about 400yds and take over themselves.

[MPN11]

I could suggest that 400 yards is ambitious ... I would feel vulnerable at 200 yards, though ;)

[langleybaston]

Divided by a common language indeed.

One of my hats involved representing UK on NATO and AFCENT Met. Committee meetings. One Brit only, lots of US Bird Colonels and half colonels of course. A slack handful of Dutch, Belgian and German, sometimes a Dane and an Italian. And a German civilian chairman.

The meetings were conducted in English, and whenever the Chairman wanted a point clarifying or a Minute drafting, he always turned to me, as a "native language speaker". This caused some stress at times with the cousins.

Fortunately I had not gone deaf at that time.

[2Planks]

Those dreaded words "Stand-by for a PIM in NUCO". By the time the kneepad and chinagraph decode had been completed you had been shot down by the ship or needed the tanker!