air-sol: I wouldn't call your airline a "small" one, with 17 heavy jets (soon to be 20 if I'm not mistaken
)!
The language issue keeps coming back because it is such an important part of flight safety. When you mention that foreign (i.e., non-French-speaking) pilots come into CDG two or three times a month, I beg to differ. Some of those in my outfit fly to CDG nearly every weekday (or night, to be more specific), and while some of them understand some basic French, some don't. Therefore I sometimes have to increase their situational awareness by translating what I hear in French on the same frequency, such as a clearance to land to an aircraft behind us on the ILS, and I can recommend that they keep the speed up because I know from the callsign that the following aircraft is an A321/737 etc. So I end up doing my PF/PNF duties and translating
at the same time...
Foreign pilots routinely flying in and out of CDG (or MRS, or NCE, etc.) learn the airport's peculiarities pretty fast. But when you say that accidents caused by the use of different languages are non-existent, I think you conveniently overlook the 25 June 2000 collision at CDG between Air Liberte 8807 (an MD-83) taking off on 27L and Streamline Aviation 200 (a Shorts 330). No matter that the BEA report tried to shift some of the blame on the British crew for not understanding French (!), the accident was largely (although not only) caused by ATC speaking French to the French aircraft and English to the British one. And by the way, the First Officer on the Shorts was killed in the collision, and the captain seriously injured. So people
have died because of language-induced misunderstandings and ambuiguity. And as we know, ambiguity in aviation is the mother of all
ups...
The tired refrain that Chinese, or Spanish, are more used than English is a lot of tosh. Granted, more people might be speaking them as their native language, but these languages are not more
widely spoken the world over, i.e. they are understood in a more limited
geographical area than English.
I totally agree with
Me Myself regarding the poor level of English teaching and practice in France, and the people's attitude to speaking foreign languages in general; no wonder the level of proficiency in the population at large in neighbouring countries is miles ahead of us. Back to the topic though: there is more than meets the eye to the AF safety audit, there are internal politics involved as well, and while a debate should always be welcome, it's anyone's guess what will come out of it...
Cheers
