Zeffy
Perhaps the ATC was unfamiliar with the characteristics of a transmission via
a microphone in an O2 mask -- leading him to believe the communication came from a handheld?
That possibility only exists in the real world where pilots land aircraft with smoke-filled cockpits and recorded ATC conversations implicate that very thing.
Here, however, the real human factor experts decide what's irrelevant and what's not, and when coorelation does in fact equal causation.
For example, in this case an American pilot used the word "Emergency" to an American controller working at an American airport. That the controller would be entirely familiar that the word "Emergency" means an emergency, but doesn't matter to the experts who will pretend what you have here is the equivalent of speaking Swahili to a Mongolian because it grates on them like nails on a chalkboard. If it mattered, then it blows their whole chance to pontificate about sloppy American phraseology, thus reducing the chance to feel superior, which in turn starves what can only be described as a cultural need.
So one must ignore that the first action for virtually any smoke-filled cockpit scenario is to don an O2 mask, and therefore transmissions were likely being made via the same. Forget also that transmitting on same sounds much different to the reciever not only vs boom mic, but also if that "new" voice suddenly pops up in airspace where nobody else is. Disregard the controllers own words about the call "sounding like it was from a handheld" as well as the person in the article who implies prior rougue transmissions helped lead the controller to erroneously jumping to this conclusion.
And of course, reject out of hand the message could have been truncated in the first place. After all, they were cowboys, and the fact they were transmitting to someone fluent in cowboyspeak is irrelevant when there's a chance to admonish the wild-ass rodeo riders in the U.S. ATC system.
It's really no fun and one can't run an internet Ground School on one's favorite subject if this incident can't simply be equated to other incidents or accidents where poor phraseology was the cause. Therefore, this one must be chalked up to that too, you see.