Aviation English

[goatface]

An Italian business friend will be spending a lot of time over the next 18 months working in the UK and will also be doing a lot of flying on business in his own Baron G58 (lucky sod).
His standard of written English is almost perfect, conversational and business oral skills very good, but he has a very strong accent and has difficulty in making himself clearly understood with aviation phraseology.
He'll be based in the Manchester area, but visiting a lot of busy airports, often flying IFR and doesn't want to have to repeat everything he says until he's understood.

Does anyone have any reccomendations for organisations who could help him improve his English Aviation Phraseology to a high level?
All the companies he's approached so far only seem to be interested in enrolling him on a course which involves learning basic written and oral skills, which is a waste of his time.

Cheers.

[Sir George Cayley]

Somewhere on the CAA website is a booklet about just this. It's a supplement to CAP413. I may have dreamed this but the web version I think you can hear the phrase by clicking on the words.

Of course if he wants a hand holder let me know.

Grazie Mille!

SGC

[riverrock83]

This is the supplement I think SGC means:
CAP 413 Radiotelephony Supplement 3: A Reference Guide to UK Radiotelephony Phraseology for General Aviation Pilots | Publications | CAA (http://www.caa.co.uk/application.aspx?catid=33&pagetype=65&appid=11&mode=detail&id=3749)

To be honest though I suspect that he knows what the phraseology is and he sounds like he can understand others using it, so I doubt that this will help a huge amount.

I suspect he would be better to have one to one sessions with a voice coach, and go through a series of elocution lessons. An expert will help him to adjust the tone and intonation he uses which will improve the clarity of his comms.

If he pulls together a list of all of the phrases that he will need (perhaps write out all the comms for some end to end journeys) then I would have thought he wouldn't need an aviation specialist as they are used to scripts of all sorts anyway.

Unfortunately I don't know anyone in that line of work, but I'm sure there would be people able to help no matter where he is based.

Good luck to him - and all power to him for being active in trying to sort out this "problem".

[patowalker]

I had an Italian FI in the UK and although his RT was perfectly clear to me, it was not always so for those on the receiving end, but this was at locations without much international traffic.

I would imagine that Manchester and 'busy airports' are experienced in RT with non-native English speakers and should be used to foreign accents. Might be useful to visit the tower for a chat and try to identify phrases that might cause difficulty.

Non-native pronunciations of English - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-native_pronunciations_of_English#Italian)

[AdamFrisch]

As a non-native English speaker my experience is that a good controller will try to be extra clear with people who might struggle a little bit. I find that UK controllers are normally very good and helpful in this regard.

I used to get tongue twisted and have all sorts of problem with my R/T in English, and I still do at times. My English is pretty good (if I may say so myself), but it was just a mental block. I made a conscious effort to slow everything down as the tendency in R/T is to be very quick, be "in the know", emulate military jargon and abbreviate too much. It's especially bad here in the US - much better in the UK.

Tell him to take his time, be super clear and xmit ICAO-English with correct phraseology or at least easily comprehended and I'm sure he will get understood. If they know what's coming and can quickly figure out what he's asking for, then even a very heavy accent will be clear. Don't let ATC or anyone else bully him into cutting corners and abbreviate etc, that's when it all goes tits up in my experience.