Fly Stimulator
5th Oct 2002, 17:50
I flew down to Deauville from Redhill today for a spot of lunch and a sightseeing trip over the Normandy invasion beaches.
When we arrived at about 12:30 local the ATC was as usual doing a great job, switching to and fro from English to French and keeping everything flowing smoothly.
By the time we left 90 minutes later, ATC had gone off-air for the afternoon and the chap in the flight office was already hopping mad about all the English pilots who were failing to use French for their radio calls, since the airfield had effectively reverted to the French self-announcing system. He was angry enough about what he saw as the danger posed by this that he was noting down the registrations of the Britsh aircraft and saying that he was going to report them.
I can see his point – at an uncontrolled field in a foreign country you would expect to use the local language for making calls to the local traffic. Fortunately my French is adequate so I could make the switch, but I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to do so at a place like Deauville which normally has English-language ATC if I hadn’t got a pre-emptive lecture on the subject while booking out!
Something to be a bit wary of.
By the way, there’s a handy list of French RT translations here (http://www.webvivant.com/aero-andaines/french.html), though unless you speak enough to understand what everybody else is saying as well then it might not get you very far.
When we arrived at about 12:30 local the ATC was as usual doing a great job, switching to and fro from English to French and keeping everything flowing smoothly.
By the time we left 90 minutes later, ATC had gone off-air for the afternoon and the chap in the flight office was already hopping mad about all the English pilots who were failing to use French for their radio calls, since the airfield had effectively reverted to the French self-announcing system. He was angry enough about what he saw as the danger posed by this that he was noting down the registrations of the Britsh aircraft and saying that he was going to report them.
I can see his point – at an uncontrolled field in a foreign country you would expect to use the local language for making calls to the local traffic. Fortunately my French is adequate so I could make the switch, but I'm not sure it would have occurred to me to do so at a place like Deauville which normally has English-language ATC if I hadn’t got a pre-emptive lecture on the subject while booking out!
Something to be a bit wary of.
By the way, there’s a handy list of French RT translations here (http://www.webvivant.com/aero-andaines/french.html), though unless you speak enough to understand what everybody else is saying as well then it might not get you very far.