Just some quotes from CASA's current Flight Safety Australia magazine re ATC training:
‘One of our biggest issues is communication,’ says Russell Eastaway, an ATC training specialist at Airservices’ Learning Academy in Melbourne, reinforcing this with a telling statistic: ‘communication is a causal factor in approximately 75 per cent of aviation accidents/incidents’.
Russell Eastaway explains that the Learning Academy emphasises ‘active listening, where ATC trainees focus on listening to every word’, as well as not combining a number of different instructions in one transmission, in order to minimise confusion.’ Compared to the rest of the world, Australian ATC training and oversight is ‘very regimented’, Eastaway says. ‘All controllers have regular six-monthly assessments, with communication one of the test elements. To retain their ATC endorsements, controllers must score at least 4 on a scale of 1-7. If controllers scored 3 on communication/phraseology, for example, they would have to undertake remedial study, and be reassessed in a month’s time.’