act700 said:
For all involved in the 1549 deal, I'm glad it was NY, and not London, cause without Mayday, they probably would have gotten arrested and violated!
If that's what you think perhaps you'd better not fly in European airspace, no sense exposing yourself to that kind of bureaucracy....
The standard format of distress call is a tool to let you practice, in the sim or in other training environments, getting over the information that it would help ATC or SAR, or D&D, to know- the idea being that if it then happens for real you can make the call easily without having to think about it. If you don't have time, no one is going to make a big deal as long as the people who need to know (perhaps in order to clear a runway for you?) getsome kind of warning.
Incidentally, the one time I have made a genuine distress call, I used the standard format but got the reply "err, what?" from ATC!