Hello all,
Thanks to those of you who did the survey. To answer PPRUNE Towers the question is related to the ICAO Rating Scale. If something were to happen frequently, how would you label it as a percentage? My objective is to do a survey on what these frequency adverbs and other subjective factors in the rating scale actually mean to different people.
An example: as of the results now the word "frequently" means
40% of the time to a couple of people;
50% of the time to one person surveyed;
60% of the time to 4 people;
70% of the time to 2 other people;
80% of the time to yet 4 different surveyed people and
to one person it means 100%.
The rating scale is subjective, every Member State has interpreted this Standard in their own way and until now only few have really taken it seriously yet miscommunications still seem to be a relevant issue in Human Factors in Aviation.
Some States have decided that language people and/or Operational professionals can be examiners yet few seem to be really sure of how to use the scale or worse have hired outside companies' tests to do so and those tests are unable to the job.
Think of it as if TREs or ATC examiners had to start using a subjective scale to rate their peers. On a line check a pilot has to say "FO Smith sometimes uses 'heavy' with the callsign" or "almost never forgets to lower the landing gear". What about if you had to report "ATC Joe frequently fails to remind altimeter settings to pilots descending from FL to ALT". How can this be a judicial answer?
My survey is only to prove that we are all human so adverbs of frequency and vague descriptors are not to be used for judging performance in a GO/NO GO situation. These people's livelihoods are on the line and it's a fallible system.
On another rant: I am all together against the testing aspect of this standard. I am all for required number of hours of effective communications training in English by people learned in this arena. For those operational personnel who are not at a proficiency level that allows such training then remedial training in English as a second/foreign language should be mandatory. Native speakers of English should undergo communications training (especially monolingual speakers of English). Lastly, fines and penalties should be issued to those who do not use R/T phraseologies properly.
My very non-academic survey and public ranting will not get any such standard changed but through various channels I am trying to get the Aviation Public aware that you are about to be tested by people who think differently on almost every (pardon the pun) aspect of the rating scale and are subject to emotions and one's rating reflects these facts. Your tester could very well think that almost never means 100% or 50%-do you want the latter to judge your proficiency?
We as raters should be calibrated periodically and most have a percentage of their ratings re-rated by a peer for quality control but this is not enough. Tests out there being used right now are performed by people who have been trained poorly and this will have a great washback effect on their candidates and the rest of the aviation world. No one seems to care, but then you speak of the Koreans who seem to have passed their test yet they still are unable to communicate in English.
I am reading "Flight Discipline" by Tony Kern and he states
"Communications: ...but aviators generally believe themselves to be excellent communicators-and therein lies our challenge. How can we improve our communications when we ourselves don't think there is a problem?"
Communication problems can not be labelled "foreign pilots in American airspace". Recently three native English speaking pilots and two native speaking ATC's somehow miscommunicated enough to let an airplane land at the wrong airport. Now all anyone cares about is getting a certificate. Does anyone out there really care about communicating effectively for safety?
Thanks again for those of you who did the survey and I hope that more of you will follow.
Best,
PE