Terpster and Guppy,
I don't want to sidetrack the thread any more than necessary, but your comments on Cali suggest I need to clarify.
Everybody seems to want to select their favorite causal factors for a given accident, and say "it was *really* this". Analysts such as myself list and discuss all of them. If we want to prioritise some for some reason, we then provide our criteria and perform the selection. The paper which I referenced considers broadly speaking the language issues. It does not consider the others (for that, see our full analysis).
The NTSB letter on the accident to the FAA mentions the very issues that Gibbon and I discussed in the short paper I referenced. There is a reason for that.
Concerning "runway heading",
Originally Posted by PBL
....the problems US pilots have flying runway heading in the UK when instructed to do so by ATC......
Originally Posted by Guppy
.....I've never found that to be the case. That is, where such isolated cases may exist, these are pilots failing to follow an established ATC direction, not a language ambiguity
Mistaken analysis. It is controllers not following established phraseology. The appropriate response as a pilot is to query the clearance.
And the reason it is no longer established phraseology is ..... ??
Language is an issue.
For example, people here have surmised that hiren.bhingradia is a low-time insufficiently-trained newby, or maybe a simmer, simply on the basis that heshe is not using terminology we consider appropriate. No one has yet considered whether the terminology heshe uses might be what is commonly used in hisher environment. (If so, of course, there is yet another language issue to be sorted!)
PBL