Do listen to those tapes, people. To begin with that little voice chirps up his few rehearsed words only when he dares, and when he does almost sounds like he has an inferiority complex about doing so.
He meekly requests pushback I think at least three times before he is acknowledged, and he doesn't sound like someone very confident about what he is requesting, does he? Or at best he doesn't sound like someone very confident in using RT, at least in English.
As a rule I think, when they are already handling higher workload than the norm, ATC quite rightly deliberately don't engage with weak-willed sounding pilots (pilots who sound like they might drop the ball). Better that any weak-wills and their passengers remain safely out of danger without extra clearances to engage in risk. ATC then create that little extra time to 'guide' any less than crisply communicating pilot. I think that's what this controller did with this pilot. I think that when ATC did acknowledge, ATC deliberately 'coaxed' the Iberia in ways designed to check the pilot's clear comprehension of the potential hazard before issuing any clearance that allowed engagement in the risk. ATC in fact had to coax this pilot a number of times about deicing. Finally the interrogated captain made that abundantly clear communication
"We don't need it".
Immediately following that one, you can pretty much hear in ATC's tone, a conclusion that this captain has indeed heard all the prompts to deice, but contrary to what everyone else was doing, he has just said he knows what he is doing (God help him). In issuing the clearance to him, and following several warning attempts, there is now the clear transferance of full icing risk and liability to the Captain. ATC had done all he could possibly be expected to do to alert a presumably sensible 340 captain to a likely hazard, yet the Captain had as good as said "There is no such hazard affecting my aircraft PERIOD".
LTD also knew that ATC's clear warning had failed to influence the presumably sensible 340 captain. His own neatly interjected
"You do" was not I think intended to be anything other than a shorthand gift of a comment - a
'one professional to another' suggestion - to please have a rethink. It was not a long detailed warning. It was a discreet prompt that was short enough to have been missed by most monitoring stations but should have been picked up by the two currently active stations (ATC and Iberia). Sadly, judged by his overall RT performance on the tapes, I think the Iberia captain's command of English, and awareness of what else was going on on the RT was all very limited, and I think he was completely oblivious to LTD's two word warning. LTD's was not standard RT, but it was clearly recognisable English, so Iberia had his chance for a discreetly prompted rethink, and was oblivious to it. That is why he was then chased down again more forcefully.
I would not be surprised if the Iberia captain had even formed any awareness from the RT traffic that he was indeed the only one not getting deiced. There was obviously a lot of ancilliary RT uncertainty about BOS procedures for pushing back a bit to conduct deicing, and the frequency was being used in non-standard exchanges about requesting 15 foot, 20 foot, 30 feet pushbacks prior to deice, and even a question about what ATC were doing with that information...ATC's response was something like
"I was just trying to get an idea of how many were doing it" which was the type of RT that would have meant very little to a non-native English speaker.
Don't get me wrong, I don't speak more than the one language very well either, and I also know that at he best of times US RT is often difficult for the world's other English speakers, so I can guess it was difficult for the Iberia captain.
But we really do need to understand how despite all the warnings, this flight slipped through the net undeiced - RT isn't the best place to be having a conference about the pros and cons of deicing, but neither is the warm cosy flightdeck of the aircraft under discussion unless all the participants have been out and up very recently for a proper look
The particular thing I don't understand however, is when the entire three man Iberia crew did catch on as to what was being queried, they all gave BA
that "wave" which I think only has one broad meaning i.e.
"Thanks but no thanks".
Quite simply, the Iberia stepped out of line either deliberately or inadvertently, and ultimately they conciously took risks that peers didn't. We really do need to know how that happens, and I am glad it is being discussed here.