haughtney1 :
You are saying multi-lingual ATC is a good thing? or at the very least...not an impediment to situational awareness and flight safety???? or that you don't feel it increases/decreases the chances of an incident based upon its uses and limitations?
Please clarify...
I see that my English is not that clear :
1- I am definitively not for multi lingual ATC. I believe that in airspace where there is multinational IFR operations only English Phraseology should be used.
2. It is indeed an impediment to situation awareness, espacially in airports ground operations..
3. But he current statistics do not support that using multi language in R/T is unsafe. And that is the problem, if you want to change the current policy.
Is it clearer now ?
Unless you can prove with hard facts, not impressions , that it is unsafe, you are not going to change the current political stalemate in ICAO.
Because there are many advantages for a State or an ATC service Provider to operate and teach its employees ( pilots and controllers ) in their national language. It is not per se nationalism, it is more an economic issue.
Chili Monster :
1) Inex Adria DC9 v BEA Trident: Gradimir Tasic, when he realised what was happening, slipped back into Croat to give instructions to the DC9 - The BEA crew had no idea what was going on. Had they had the situational awareness of hearing what was happening it's possible things could have been different
2) SH360 Runway collision - LFPG. The streamline crew had no idea what was going on, again because of the dual language scenario.
Not many lives? 1 life is 1 too many - how many do you consider acceptable?
Old rumours die hard. The reports of those 2 accidents are availbale on the net, I suggest you read them again , especially the CVR transcripts to see that what you say is not completely correct.
1) Zagreb : the remark in Serbo Croat was refering to " the level you are passing now ". the initial call by the DC9 (estimating ZAG at same time as the HS21 ) that could have raised situation awareness to the BEA crew, was done in English. See the HS21 CVR to see what the crew was discussing at the time.
Using Serbo croat instead of English in the last seconds was definitively not a cause, nor a contributing factor in this accident.
2) On the Shorts in CDG, there it is different: The inquiry identified 3 causes for the accident : 1) the controller had a wrong perception of where the aircrfat were. 2) the way ATC worked then it made it impossible to detect errors made and 3) the Shorts crew did not quiery where the number 1 was upon accepting the conditional clearance.
The inquiry board then listed 6 contribution factors, and indeed one is about the use of 2 languages in R/T.
There might be 3 of 4 accidents in the ICAO database where dual R/T can be listed as a contribution factor. There is none ( as far as I know) listing it as the primary cause.. The proponents of keeping the curent situation are using those facts not to change anything.
As to how many lives do I consider acceptable, none of course. But If I had unlimited ressources and I was allowed 3 wishes in aviation,I would probably use them solving other priorities that are claiming far more lives than Spanish on the R/T.