You know, if I'm in an emergency and some moron yells "Guard" while I'm trying to get help, I have a little phrase that I can use to tell them to shove it... SEELONCE MAYDAY. Quite useful really. I know the station in distress is supposed to say it, but I'd be up for another pilot doing it on my behalf.
We used to always prefix the callsigns with Pan or Mayday throughout the emergency so that everyone knew what was happening.
I understand that now this is just a discretionary thing. Is that correct?
SATCOS - here in Canada that is a requirement as described in RIC-21, 6.13 Distress Traffic where it states:
In distress traffic, the distress signal “MAYDAY”, spoken once, shall precede all transmissions. This procedure is intended to alert stations not aware of the initial distress call and now monitoring the distress channel that traffic heard relates to a distress situation.
However, actually getting pilots to transmit a Distress Message in the first place is like trying to pull teeth.