Originally Posted by
Youmightsaythat
I suspect 99% of the replies on here have missed the overriding law in aviation.
Its referred to as 'tombstone safety'. Nothing changes until there are deaths and it costs more in insurance payouts than to fix the problem.
How much would it cost, apart from the dint in nationalistic pride, for it to be compulsory for English to be used at one of the busiest airports in Europe. Let's remember standard RT phraseology does not mean having to be fluent. Indeed if you said 'QNH' to a typical Englishman you might as well be talking Mandarin. How hard can it be?
Harder than you might think, in my view.
Various suggestions have been made about how the initial incorrect value could or should have been caught, irrespective of how that incorrect value came to be communicated by ATC. They are way outside my area of expertise, but language use isn't, and my conviction, informed by professional and personal experience, is that requiring people who share a native language to communicate in a non-native language is a recipe for poor communication and potentially just as great a problem as any due to the use of multiple languages.