From thee report, as written by the pilot, it seems that they were not under the impression that FL200 would represent 2.000 ft, but they were unsure what their cleared level was and temporarirly levelled off at 2.000 ft to get clarification first.
This points out the additional possibility of numeric confusion over in the written domain. 2.000 ft is two feet where I come from (see:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01...w-9/index.html). From context this is obviously not what you meant but it is another example of how ambiguities in expressing numerical quantities can bite us in the international flying business.
For years I've worked with a flight plan that has fuel in hundreds of pounds with no decimal on the flight plan, fuel in thousands of pounds with a decimal on the dispatch release and fuel in pounds on the ACARS performance printout.
I've had a fuel order of 2000 lbs. additional for weather pumped as 20000 lbs.(I purposely left out the numeric separator here
) more by a truck that was calibrated in liters. Not a big deal this time, we caught it on the crosscheck and didn't have a full load to begin with. We ended up tankering the extra fuel rather than going through a time consuming defueling process. I suspect the error was generated by decimal format confusion in the updated dispatch release and flight plan.
And, yes, like a lot of us, I've flown with fuel in kilos as well...