European ATC - Language problems..
Now i'm quite new to commercial flying, but i'm pretty sure that some of the continuous language issues i experience are causing quite a few safety issues.
Yesterday i experienced a situation which can only be described as a complete breakdown in communication. Half through French airspace we were speaking to a Radar controller and requested weather for our destination and alternate. For some bizaare reason (which can only be explained by the controllers poor understanding of basic ICAO RT) he misundestood that we wanted to change our destination! When we explained a second time that we were only requesting weather, we thought we had solved this 'small' understanding.
Little did we know that the problem would escalate! We there passed passed to Swiss Radar - and nothing mentioned about a change of routing or destination....
Later we were passed to Milan and began our approach into our destination (or what we thought was our destination!). We then got quite an unusual routing- however we questioned this routing and assured that it was correct! - we assumed that we were being radar vectored for a shorter routing (Our commercial alternate is around 35miles east of our destination). when we passed 20 miles to the east of our destination (under Radar control) we were passed to the approach control of our alternate! it was then that we realised there was a problem. The approach controller had apparently been informed that we had changed our destination! at no stage did we state this -
i can only think that the French controller passed the information onto the relevant controllers. But at no stage did any controller confirm that we wanted to divert. In my short experience i can see this happening again. it would be interesting to hear of similar language problems within Class A airspace!
anyway - i'm glad i've got that off my chest! a professional European sky?
RA