THE NON ANGLOPHONE PERSPECTIVE
What a great thread!
I teach Aviation English to French Air Traffic Controller students at the French Aviation University (l'ENAC) in Toulouse and being an SA ATPL, Instructor and Radio Licence Examiner, I am struck by the amount of training that the ICNAs (ATCs) undergo and specifically in phraseaology.
I am also struck by the lack of real training that Pilots recieve in this field.
We tend to blunder our way through our Radio Licences and at the end of the day say things like "estimating yours" (if you do this to PE ATC they will ask if you are going to George!), or we call "position" over Africa because we know that if we give our AIREP correctly, the only response we will get is "station calling"!!
Here is a question: if you are told by ATC to "climb F250" is the correct response "climb or climbing F250"? Just shows the lack in my own training since I have been corrected here to say "climbing" whereas I have always (been) taught to read back verbatim.
I hope that all English speaking pilots and ATC are gearing up for 2008 when the new ICAO Language Proficiency Rating Scale minimum level 4 comes into effect. It will affect English mother toungue speakers as well (I am sure you have all skimmed through the AIC in this regard and ignored it).
Quite frankly I am shocked by the slang and casual language used over the air. I have only really become aware of it since listening to the many recordings we use to teach our students to comprehend "Live Traffic" and they listen in amazement to South African, American, British, Australian Pilots and ATCs in real recordings. We are expecting non mother tongue English ATCs and Pilots to use correct phraseology but we don't use it ourselves.
Back to the original thread. Avianca B707 Flight AV052 from Bogota to JFK crashed at Cove Neck, NY (1990) 12 miles short of the field due to lack of fuel. The Captain spoke no English and the FO overestimated his own Engilish abilitiies. The Captain told him to warn the ATC that they were running out of fuel but the FO made a vague reference to it to ATC and told the Captain that he had indeed made them aware of their plight. Apart from the cultural differences between the American ATC and the S American pilots, the FAA report into the crash gave the cause, amongst other, as "the lack of standardized understandable terminology for pilots and controllers for minumum and emergency fuel states". 73 fatalities resulted.
I wonder if somebody can put chapter and verse to the term "declaring an emergency" (in terms of ICAO Doc 4444).
I will be using this thread in my classes the future.