Originally Posted by
Hotel Tango
There are of course numerous factors which can lead to these type of incidents. Some contributing factors are possibly:
- use of non ICAO phraseology (the norm in the USA though).
- Over rapid delivery of clearances by controllers.
- A tendency to clip the first part of the call sign when initiating a transmission.
These busy U.S. airports have to move a lot of traffic. In their endeavour to keep things moving, many controllers resolve to speaking much faster than they in fact really need to. Couple that with the additional traffic information they have to reel off prior to giving what should be a relatively simple take-off or landing clearance and you have a recipe for misunderstandings.
Looking at the amount of daily flights in the USA and the use of non-ICAO phraseology, I think the this whole proper R/T ICAO pet argument is grossly exaggerated.
I agree that especially SWA should use less slang domestically.
I disagree that reading back single numbers are much safer than read in chunks, the system of using different letters as suffixes seems to be best solution.