Airbrake,

Here here. And Blatantly biased in their favour. The Brits, Germans, swiss and Dutch are excellent, and all credit to them.

We all know which airspace we would choose if we had to put out a MAYDAY!

They're/their/there

O dear,,, very weak comeback They're/their/there

It sounds the same on the radio, spelling grammer is not the issue for safe flight!

the issue is they will reply with unreadable check your radio,,,, nope,, check your ICAO Level6! would be my responce! you cant speak the lauguage so get off the ATC,, I could not care a monkeys if they can spell half the words!

No one asks you to spell MAYDAY when decening like a love sick bird with the wings on fire.

VERY WEAK KICK THE TIRES

But its you that can't spell - or is English not your mother tongue?

Zero.

This subject is too serious for petty attacks on individuals to derail it. However, when an individual contributes to a thread using the written word, they tend to be taken more seriously if they can be bothered to use a spell checker and show some awareness of Grammar.

If English isn't your first language then disregard this!

Yes I cant spell perfect English, freely admit that,,, no i don't work in a Library so don't really care, I can speak ICAO level 6 and thats what I need when talking to ATC,, and thats what they need talking to me,, if they cant spell perfectly I don't care!

Again,, very week argument, this thread is about ATC issues, one been that they cant speak english well enough, we are not texting each other in the flight deck nor do I want to become pen pals with them. :ugh:

Zerotohero,

Thank you very much for your consideration with us. Your words can give me a clear idea the kind of person you are.

Fortunately, There are a lot of pilots quite different from zerotohero. I will give the best service I can every day, though nowadays are very difficult days for us here in Spain (worst in 30 years), ATC situation in Spain is an European experiment will expand in a lot of countries in the next months/years.

Best Regards and hoping someday you will change your opinion when good times come again, and hoping you will never be in the same situation we are now.

We will meet in frecuency,

Cernicalo.

Quote from Zerotohero:

Cercicalo wrote: "As maybe we talked each other in AGP, Could you please, write all the phrase: "Controllers on the job... training monitored"

Zerotohero wrote: "lol,,, when I hear that in Spain I cant but help write down idiot in training when copying down the ATIS."

Oh my god.... I hope speaking much better than writting :confused:

A couple of remarks, while we're still off-topic.

While not disputing your assertion (and it works both ways too: I was spared a non-entirely unjustified telling off because the controller did not have the required fluency :E), I believe the pilots hold most of the responsibility on this one, as it is them who initiate communications. I know Spanish controllers will reply in English to the very few and very commendable local pilots who use that language. Funnily, they seem to communicate better than when a native speaker is involved :)

As for the comments about spelling...

It is my opinion that you should. For a start, not spelling correctly is a sign of a lack of education (some also say a lower middle class origin, but I won't go there :bored:); it also shows a lack of commitment to making oneself understood, and is disrespectful to your audience, a significant portion of which are not native speakers and thus will find your misspelled prose more difficult to follow than would be the case otherwise.

Mind you, it doesn't help that five of the six previous posts (Airbrake's excepted) contain spelling errors of one kind or another. :ok:

Although your argument is well founded LH2, I can't understand why you expect foreigners to spell correctly when half the 'educated' Brits posting on this site can't!

We are moving again in the old language/cultural debate ( also open in the French ATC thread).
A correction : No it did not, read again the report : a badly issued ATC conditional clearance ,combined with a poorly understood intersection line up caused this collision. (For memory : The T/O to the MD80 was in French but well before the conditional line up clearance issued to the Short, and both captains reported that none was monitoring the calls made on the R/T to other a/c due heavy workload at the time )
But there is indeed a recommendation in the report to study the use a single language in runway ops in CDG , but it was not a cause , even less a "key cause" .
In fact and this is "fortunately" or "unfortunately" ( I leave to you to choose the correct adjective ) there is no recorded accident where using a local language in addition to English was an issue.
Do not come with rumors and urban tales,( like Zagreb etc..) the fact is there is nothing in the ICAO accident database. This fact was even used by the Canadians to allow French in ATC in Quebec in 1976, and it still is in force today.
Cultural differences and lack of understanding each other are the problem, not the dual language.
Declaring an emergency for instance is seen in many cultures as an admission of failure. That has killed a lot of people. Dual use of language none.
Therefore ICAO has ( correctly and wisely in my opinion ) opted for the mandatory proficiency language training ( the famous level "4" ) instead of banning dual languages use.
For the Spanish or French ATC, yes they are very different from the UK, but who says the UK way of working is the one that everyone else in the world should use ?

ATC Watcher I normally agree with you. But I do not see the clear link between language proficiency training and the issue of dual language use. I would suggest that the latter was simply a bridge too far for ICAO mostly for political reasons. Arguing that they are acting wisely is putting it a bit strongly, at best they are acting pragmatically.

I am also surprised by the lack of any record of problems. You are saying that the controller in the trident midair with the Yugoslav DC9 spoke English at all times? How about the Canary Islands DanAir 727 where the controller ended up with him entering the hold the wrong way and hitting the mountain. He never used Spanish with the Spanish inter island turboprop that he was trying to put in front?

Turbulence reports in French are another bugbear, surely letting other pilots know might be helpful?

I do agree with your point about cultural differences. But some of them are not just national. They are also between controllers and pilots unfortunately.

You must have read a different report to me. I read this one, which has in the conclusions:

http://garychapelhill.files.wordpres...pg?w=180&h=142

Lederhosen : don’t get me wrong : I am not denying the fact that language issues were contributing factors to some accidents. They indeed were in a few, but they never were any CAUSE of an accident since ICAO started its database.
Zagreb, Cali, Tenerife, Dan air and KLM/Pan Am, New York/ Avianca etc.. are examples of this, but as contributing factors . The causes , all of them of these accidents were elsewhere.
Singleling out one contributing factor out of its context is unfortunately often done and generally lead to the wrong conclusions. Take Ueberlingen as a good example :the report has 2 immediate causes and 3 systemic causes, but has 21 contributing factors , each subject to a Recommendation.
But the failure of any one of those contributing factors ( say the lack of refresher safety training for controllers, or staff shortages, ) cannot be used to say it caused the collision, or was a " key issue " .

100% please : same comment as above You perhaps read too fast, again the question was about causes, not contributing factors.If you really read the BEA report , not only the last pages, and have access to the interviews of both Captains (unfortunately not in-extenso the BEA report ) you will see that dual language played in fact no role in that collision. But , as I said before, a single language could perhaps had alerted the Short crew that an aircraft was taking off on 27 had they be monitoring/ listening out on the frequency the other calls ( which they were not) , and previous incidents , (some of them mentioned on the report ) indicate that situation awareness would be greatly enhanced in international airports OPS should a single language ( i.e English )was used. Hence the recommendation. Unfortunately the implementation of that recommendation by French DGAC in CDG only lasted 2 days as Air France pilot union strongly opposed it and had it cancelled.

That is largely correct, except that in my recollection (I might be wrong), it was a minority ATC union who were the most vocal in opposing it, and eventually got the support of the right in the Assemblée. In the end it was the politicians who killed it--being helpful as always, aren't they? :hmm:

In their defence, the SEFA (France's government-owned pilot school) train their students to do all their comms in English.

and flight crews monitoring the frequency which a lot do not do (from personal experience).

ATC watcher, you previous input into most debates on pprune have been constructive and helpful!
Unfortunately, I’m losing respect for you. Please reread you comments and reconsider you arguments. I feel you’re making a fool of yourself!

ATC Watcher,

You are totally wrong to claim that the mixed use of French & English did not play a significant part in the CDG fatal.

As HundredPercentPlease has already pointed out it is stated in the report as a contributary factor and the following is a direct quote from the report.

They were then transferred to tower listening frequency. He (The Shorts Capt) heard a message in French which he did not understand, and the instruction in English concerning them “line up and wait, you are number two”

The message in French that the Shorts Captain did not understand was the Take off clearance to the MD80 and he thought he was number to an aircraft that had just passed them on landing I believe, he then moved forward towards the runway.

Mixing languages causes confusion, degrades situational awareness, and played a part in the death of the Shorts 360 First Officer. None of this is up for debate.

Non-spanish speaker..
 

but I have worked for a spanish lowcost for two years.


I can honestly say that ATC-Watcher has a point.
The "incidents" I have had were not related to the dual language being used but poor ATC work. But since my spanish improved during my two years there, I was able to interpret instructions to other traffic and act accordingly, sometimes against ATC instructions. MAD, BCN, BIO, AGP, etc...

The situations where I followed ATC instructions to the letter, is when I had the most incidents.

Most ATC in spain are very pleasent to work with and nice to chat with, when on the jumpseat, but their training is lacking.

I also feel that the spanish pilots are to blame, not for speaking spanish, but for accepting non-standard instructions, which leads to ATC expecting everyone to follow these instructions. And when they do not, confusion arises...

(please, I am not a native english speaker, so don't kill me for my spelling erors:))

68+iou1 and Airbrake : Do not let your emotions and beliefs alter your judgment. Look at the facts to make your opinion, do not look for some facts you like to confirm a pre-conceived belief.

Airbrake : In an aviation incident or accident everything is up for debate. Nothing is black and white . They are generally no “good guys” and “ bag guys” but a lot of pre-conceived ideas , not always delivering very good advice. This is what I was trying to explain in a few lines. A one day lecture would be more appropriate though.
For the sake of the argument, on the CDG collision just ask yourself, ( as we did during the investigation ) if the take off clearance to the MD80 had been in English, should this had changed anything ? If you think it did, send me a PM , I’ll send you the reasoning why it did not.

ATC Watcher,

That is not the point.

Do you think safety would be:

• Improved
• No different
• Made worse

If all pilots on a frequency could understand all communications?

To the non-French/Spanish operating in their airspace, it appears that the preservation of their language is a higher priority than flight safety. And that has to be wrong, however long the lecture.