pudoc
I think if the US had phraseology like the UK it wouldn't have happend.
"mayday mayday mayday speedbird one two five six" - can easily hear the callsign
No? UK Captain at UK Heathrow.
"Mayday mayday. Speedbird Speedbird. Nine five nine five" - Sure, you can easily hear the incorrect/nonexistant/wrong callsign. After the wrong callsign, nothing. No nature of emergency. No position.
Do you honestly believe that the Heathrow controller who responded to the crash of that 777 would have had the slightest clue who or where "Speedbird 9595" was had the weather been such as it was in Denver (1/2 mile/snow) based on that useless call made a second before impact? Not a chance. The "Who" and "what" of that event was made self-evident looking out the window.
I bring this up to answer your conjecture that UK R/T in the U.S. would prevent the incident in Denver. Are you suggesting that if the United Express had declared "Mayday Mayday, Acey Acey, Fantasy Flight Number, Fantasy Flight Number", and then said nothing from that time foward until the tower heard the Captain of some unidentified aircraft giving the PA evacuate order on tower freq of an aircraft he couldnt see due to IMC conditions, the trucks would have arrived there sooner? Sorry, but I'm just not buying that uttering "Mayday" has that magic power.
US: "twelve fifty-six emergency" if said rapidly or the pilot is a split second too late pushing the PTT in his high-stress situation the 12 could easily be lost and rather than AAL1256 being the a/c the controller thinks is in trouble he could think UAL56 is in trouble.
The controller heard "NIne, and thought it sounded like "uNIted". Probably the best prevention would have been if the pilot had transitted 'Five Niner One Two" in response to the Controller's query instead of "Fifty-nine twelve". Even a "Five NIne One Two" response probably would have triggered "uNIted One Two" in the Controllers brain. Denver is a United hub, they probably hear and default to "United" in their sleep if they arent careful.
The controller wasn't careful enough. He has the strip with the Flight Number for reference. Yet when he experienced cognitive dissonance from thinking he heard United 12 knowing there was no United 12, instead of doing so or trying to continue the communication loop by reading back to the pilot what he heard (United 12) he defaulted to 'Hoax". Why? perhaps the odd sound of a pilot who's not used to speaking in a pinching Eros mask with O2 under pressure and speaking rapidly had him imagine some hunched over prankster in his car...he did say it "Sounded like it came from a handheld". Not using "Mayday" does NOT equate to "sounding like it came through a handheld" when U.S. standard "Emergency" phraseology is still there.
Maybe they talk about hoaxers too much at DIA without reiterating the responsibility to default to confusion with the safest response. Maybe he's the kind of guy who thinks "oh this can't be happening to me". Who knows, but for whatever reason he dropped the ball by assuming too quickly that which was wrong.
I think the RT should be a lot stricter, only need to listen to LiveATC to hear how laid back it is.
We want to sound cool
and if you tell us what "should be", we'll just do the cool, opposite thing.
"Mayday" is used in so many things world wide from fire fighters to boating I don't see why they need to add the ambiguous word that is "emergency". Ambiguous by the fact it can mean mayday or pan pan.
That's your own private definition of "ambiguous", and the reason the FAA includes both in "Emergency" is they don't want pilots getting wrapped around the axle trying to differentiate the 2 conditions...they want the pilot to request assistance right away whether it's urgency or distress. As an example, look no further than the 4th post on this thread. You'll see Typhoonboy, one of the first to jump on the "Hmph they were so unprofessional" bandwagon, opining that what the United Express pilot had (smoke in the cockpit landing IMC) rated a "routine pan call". And just think, he had time to sit around thinking at his computer before writing that.
The FAA responds to a "Pan" call like an emergency because pilots can't be trusted to always know or state the actual seriousness of their condition, and since only 0.0000001% of us went to Oxford, they try to keep it simple by removing any area that could be used for debate.
Although, the US are very far from being a dangerous place for aviation so they're doing something right, but still...tighten the RT up.
No, we sound cooler the way we do it inside the U.S. When we fly overseas and adhere to ICAO-standard R/T, it makes us feel all nerdy inside.
I bet all you Americans are thinking how strict and tight us EUs are and we need to chill out.
We are, in fact, thinking that. It's axiomatic that the cooler you sound, the better you fly. And we value flying ability above radio telphony because fun chicks don't care about radio telephony. Back in the day, when you were practicing R/T phraseology holding dictaphones and rating each other on how you sound, we were holding keg parties and rating girls asses. So there's logic behind why we do what we do.