Lederhosen : don’t get me wrong : I am not denying the fact that language issues were contributing factors to some accidents. They indeed were in a few, but they never were any CAUSE of an accident since ICAO started its database.
Zagreb, Cali, Tenerife, Dan air and KLM/Pan Am, New York/ Avianca etc.. are examples of this, but as contributing factors . The causes , all of them of these accidents were elsewhere.
Singleling out one contributing factor out of its context is unfortunately often done and generally lead to the wrong conclusions. Take Ueberlingen as a good example :the report has 2 immediate causes and 3 systemic causes, but has 21 contributing factors , each subject to a Recommendation.
But the failure of any one of those contributing factors ( say the lack of refresher safety training for controllers, or staff shortages, ) cannot be used to say it caused the collision, or was a " key issue " .
100% please : same comment as above You perhaps read too fast, again the question was about causes, not contributing factors.If you really read the BEA report , not only the last pages, and have access to the interviews of both Captains (unfortunately not in-extenso the BEA report ) you will see that dual language played in fact no role in that collision. But , as I said before, a single language could perhaps had alerted the Short crew that an aircraft was taking off on 27 had they be monitoring/ listening out on the frequency the other calls ( which they were not) , and previous incidents , (some of them mentioned on the report ) indicate that situation awareness would be greatly enhanced in international airports OPS should a single language ( i.e English )was used. Hence the recommendation. Unfortunately the implementation of that recommendation by French DGAC in CDG only lasted 2 days as Air France pilot union strongly opposed it and had it cancelled.