Originally Posted by
Youmightsaythat
Therefore you are not aware of the vitally important aspect, as a non pilot, of situation awareness.
I know what situational awareness is, and reading this forum makes me pay attention to SA when I'm driving my car. I'm prepared to learn from the expertise of others and apply it in my own field. Are you?
The fact is it is English that was adopted as the Language of the air.
Great. But that doesn't solve all the problems, especially when it comes to native English speakers:
Although the language proficiency of L1 English aviation professionals may typically be considered to be equivalent to Expert Level 6 on the ICAO Scale, they may also be sub-standard communicators in Aviation English, specifically by being prone to the use of non-standard terms, demonstrating impatience with non-native speakers, and speaking excessively, as well as too quickly. Such native speaker failings tend to worsen in emergency situations
source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English
In other words, adopting English as a universal aviation language will not solve all the problems, neither does it put the onus on resolving those problems solely on non-native speakers. Would you agree?
Thats why the question was framed as it was. Can you see any issue with the 'framing'?
I think whoever asked that question wanted the answer to be an overwhelming "a detrimental effect on safety". A more open question might have been "how would you rate the following factors in order of risk at major international airports", and even then one's choice of options would skew the findings. I note that in the other incident you referred to, language confusion was ruled out by aviation professionals as a contributing factor.
Feel free to put a poll up here and see what the reaction is
As pointed out in my previous posts, straw polls on social media are not the same thing as a professionally organised poll.
"Communication saves lives."
Of course it does. What I don't think you've acknowledged so far is that single language use does not remove all barriers to communication, even between native speakers.
For one thing, it gives non-native speakers of the 'universal' language a false sense of security that they understand each other perfectly because they are speaking the same language. My most lucrative jobs come from situations, usually with plenty of lawyers in attendance, in which it's become apparent that this is not the case (fortunately none involving fatalities so far).
For another, as the Wikipedia article points out, the way native and non-native speakers use a language differs and can in some cases make communication more difficult.
The fact is that we live in a multilingual world and language, even codified language, is not wholly unambiguous. Imposing a single language is not going to solve all communication problems and may well create others. In my view
over-insistence on this aspect is likely to mask other contributing factors to incidents, and that would not be a good thing.