to WillowRun
 

Better. Twenty-four words per sentence. But could you say it in plain English?
I think you are saying that, because so many pilots do not comply with ICAO phraseology, that it is not negligent? You guys invented jargon!

cvg2iln: ICAO, dear chap, not "Little Britain" as you so quaintly put it. And no translation is needed if the standard phrases are used - that's the whole point!

I have been based at 5 different locations around the UK, so far, none within the M25, and a year based in France too. I am simply making the observation that a lot of mistakes one hears are associated with "non-standard phrases" and I don't mean just in the USA, although that is what the OP asked. I am not claiming that the UK is perfect either, but they do have some of the busiest airspace in the world and their controllers are excellent - almost all of them use standard phraseology.

As far as ambiguity is concerned; myself, the crew and over 300 passengers might have been killed a few years back after a Mexican controller gave us the wrong QNH because he was either trying to save time, or trying to be slick, or couldn't be bothered to say the proper phrase.

As far as 'heading west and leaving the mess behind'; Thanks - I'm sure the Irish, Scottish, English, Dutch and German ATC, all of whom are the epitome of clarity and professionalism, will be delighted by that swipe.

Galaxy; I hear you.

Actually this topic is of great concern and US controllers have been working on an experimental new procedure by which they can both alert and hopefully appease complaints of British pilots operating stateside. The procedure is based on tone recognition technology and the testing thus far has been very promising. Here is a brit captain during a test who gratuitously volunteered:
http://youtu.be/IH9OvSqtxRU

cvg2iln,

If you have to ask whose standard you should be working to, you are ill prepared for your job. It seems from your subsequent points that you neither work to your own country's, nor ICAO standards. That is a problem for the rest of us, one which you seem incapable of acknowledging despite it being pointed out to you. Do you learn nothing from other people?

cvg2iln,

Have you ever considered that your inability to understand published standard phraseology in foreign airspace may say something about you?

If you can't cope with ICAO standard, varied by promulgated national differences, maybe you should ask your employer for a transfer to a domestic only fleet?

A reply to 737er...
 

OK, I must admit I laughed but you are a naughty boy!

Poor baby I thought his eyes were going to pop out!

Best RT in the universe? London Shannon Dublin Maastricht, Germany, Sncandinavian Countries. I'm just a lowly expat from a country west of 30 West, but that's the way I see it.:ok::D

Negligence, proof thereof, and "per se"
 

To mross: not exactly. (That is, your post, while using plain English admirably, does not quite state the point I made, or attempted to make.) There is the legal concept of negligence. A claim of negligence must sufficiently prove four elements. They are: first, the existence of a legal duty (that is, a legal duty owed by the person being sued (the defendant) to the person who was injured by the claimed negligence and who is suing (the plaintiff). (Plaintiff as a word includes a party suing on behalf of someone else, such as in the case of an estate suing on behalf of the individuals who tragically lost their lives in, just for example, the SFO Triple-7 mishap). Second is the element of breach, IOW breach by the defendant of the legal duty. We'll come back to that one shortly. Third is the element of 'proximate cause', which can be murky, ambiguous, highly contentious, very complicated. How many times has the NTSB found one single hole in the metaphoric Swiss cheese as the cause of a given accident? Legally the idea is to hit up the single-biggest-cause Without Which It Would Not Have Happened. Fourth is dumb-luck obvious: damages (the plaintiff has to have suffered damages).

Now, ordinarily, the plaintiff has to undertake and accomplish some heavy lifting in order to prove that the defendant breached the legal duty. Fair enough. But......the doctrine of "negligence per se" allows the plaintiff to point out to the court that the defendant's act or omission Violated a Law or Regulatory Standard of some importance. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but I'm highly confident that you get the idea.

Now to apply this to the main focus of this thread, which began with an observation or assertion that the US civil aviation system or community or cadre of pilots and controllers - whatever you want to call it - necessarily must take one of two actions. Either, one, cop an exception to ICAO. Or two, quit all the checkin' in with you, yadda yadda, blah blah blah.

And now, finally, to answer your Post In Re the Seeking of Clarification and/or Confirmation of My Prior Post. I am saying - My Contention Would Be - that because there is such open and notorious, widespread, commonplace, and impliedly accepted deviation from ICAO standard phraseology (here, meaning all the ICAO standard rules and practices for R/T), that a plaintiff could not rely on the ICAO standard to win the element of Breach of Duty on the basis of negligence per se. Certainly and obviously, if the R/T in a given mishap was a major causitive factor, a plaintiff could use its divergence from ICAO standard as evidence of negligence. But it would not be negligence per se. Per se, two words, five letters (two of which are recurrent), simple Latin to enunciate, yet, all the difference in the (legal) world.

Very interestingly, this effort at dejargonizing the point I sought earlier to make leads to another point of some substantive relevance (or so I surely hope). It is that those pilots and others advocating here for strict adherence to ICAO standards may want to think about the legal impact such adherence might well have. Namely, if you get uniform adherence to standard R/T accomplished, then deviations from such standard could very well indeed trigger findings of negligence per se. It is a sort of 'be careful what you wish for' suggestion. ICAO is, after all, just ICAO, a UN agency with a sort of concocted jurisdictional scope. I lack the qualifications to assess this point; maybe the risk of easier lawsuit outcomes is a risk well worth taking, in order to obtain compliance with the ICAO rules. On another thread, the learned and highly knowledge PJ2 held forth in eloquent expression on the need to not just respect, but to preserve, protect and defend the architecture of the Safety System of civil aviation. And thus, I defer to such far wiser posters on the matter of whether the press for compliance with standarisation has a downside in the form of easier "wins" against certificated air carriers in scheduled service and their aircrews, whether here in the US, in Great Britain, on the Continent, or anywhere else.

Lots of traffic in an approach corridor over my campus yesterday, on final to ORD, compass heading looked like about 40-45, altitude from purely visual observation about 1200-1500 feet, color me clueless to guess airspeed. Pretty closely metered - though I didn't time it, spacing seemed like under a minute 30. I'm guessing all the approach parameters and techniques, and their interplay with particular avionics or navigation systems (as is being painstakingly dissected on the UPS crash at Birmingham thread), are impacted when ATC packs the corridor with aircraft so close together? Or even with such spacing, it's all the same?

The number of wrong readbacks and missed calls by US pilots in European airspace outnumbers any other nationality by far. I blame this mainly on the use of non-standard RT in their own country and the almost sheer impossibity to communicate in standard RT.

I am surprised that the FAA does not act, or am I ?
The point made about liability and claims because of wrongdoing make sense.
It's time to clean up your act guys !

to WillowRun
 

'per se' has only one recurrent letter. No one is suggesting suing pilots for negligence; we are not using the word in its legal sense. Anyway, instead of hijacking this thread I suggest you go to eBay, buy a thousand commas and assorted punctuation marks and sell off all you capital letters. :hmm: Flesch-Kincaid reading grade 12 - needs improvement ;)

Later
 

So, don't buy my book, when it comes out, if you're so fastidious about supposed writing convention. Actually I did wonder how to count the letters, but never mind. And as to use of caps - an obviously sarcastic device, as any schoolboy knows - I can't help it if you (in the sense of anyone) have to think and pay attention when legal matters are discussed. You complained about complex sentences - so I watered them down by means of such devices.

One. The thread clearly implicated suits against carriers not just pilots (perhaps including reference to aviators was error on my part).

Two. If you think I write in excessively complex form, wait until the effort to standardize R/T more completely- if that is the way forward that is chosen - gets reduced to writing.

Three. I shudder to see the horrid word "hijack" used near or in reference to my name, even a pseudo. Please retract or ask the MOD to delete my recent posts. You already know the reason, and I care not that the "h-word" may sometimes be used here.
Good Day.

WillowRun 6 -3
 

No doubt you highlight an interesting side aspect of the ongoing discussion. However, you obviously do it with "national law focussed " glasses.
I believe your statement:
ICAO is, after all, just ICAO, a UN agency with a sort of concocted jurisdictional scope.
is simply not covering the facts.
Those experts inside ICAO, developing and evaluating the Standards and Recommended Practices, are a multi national task force, many members of which are US Americans. All the signatory states of that Convention of Chicago - USA is one of many - have agreed upon the procedure to implement these Standards and Recommended Practices into their national laws. At the same time the rule applies that deviations from that standard have to be reported to ICAO, so it can be published in Amendments to the relevant Documents.

What puzzles the international community is not the fact that deviation in R/T communications happen , but that the responsible administration - FAA - apparently misses to catch and correct the departures from international agreed procedures in the field of R/T communications.

The last chapter of your post describing the situation in ORD APP sectors is a fine example of how it should be. Obviously no controller get into his mind to apply homemade separation minima or issue undue instructions. At the same time none of those pilots involved not a moment get into their mind not to follow those instructions.
Apparently these Standards and Recommended Practices coming forth from a - concocted jurisdictional scope - wholly or partial transferred into National Rules and Regulations work very well.
Question: Why should that not be possible in R/T Communications as well ?
Jo

Annex14, sir
 

Annex14, thank you for your posted comments, and effectively impelling me to revise and extend my remarks. Let me please start with a brief note of background and/or explanation: in serving as an adjunct professor in one of my university's doctorate programs, I have been acculturated to the use of message board such as this as a means to provoke discussion from which participants may gain a better or deeper understanding of the subject at hand. In this effort I may overlook subtleties of word-choice. To wit, I meant no offense to the men and women who serve ICAO, nor to the fine and important work the organisation has done and continues to do.

Rather, the point embedded in the phrase 'concocted jurisdictional scope' is, in fact, nicely illustrated by your observation as to the relative lack of effectiveness of the FAA (with respect to requiring adherence to R/T standards). FAA, recall, has the full authority of the United States Government behind it. It has all the law enforcement staff and means and so on. Yet it is inadequate to some of its primary accountabilities: how many years has its next generation data processing system been in the pipeline?

What means does ICAO have at its disposal to enforce or require compliance with its standards?

Moreover, ICAO covers the world (I was tipped off by the word International, I guess). There are signatory states, are there not, where the concept of adherence to the R/T standards is far from anyone's idea of important? (Or maybe there are not any such states, but by intuitive reasoning, if a major customer of Airbus and Boeing flies a perfectly good aircraft into a hull loss in perfectly good weather, how well does that customer's nation-state do with ICAO standards compliance?). And are there not nations in which operators of big iron in civil transport exist, but are not signatories? Maybe ICAO is universal. I just have a hard time thinking that the approach metering from whatever they use as a TRACON for Damascus Int'l (as a random example) is as good as my friendly neighborhood ORD Terminal Control Area (that's what TCA stands for, right?). And so the whole world-wide system is so massive with so many moving parts (literally and figuratively!!) that -WITHOUT denigrating ICAO such as it is - the means and methods of that fine organisation still seem insufficient to tackle and ground this problem as a whole.

I plead guilty to seeing things through the prism of American law. But I try to be open-minded and thus, again, thank you, and good day.

the modern ways of radio com in the usa is probably due to an evolution...more planes on the radio, more complicated clearances and the like.

mind you I am one of the by the book guys on the radio, I still say WILCO for example (check the AIM pilot controller glossary). I say FIFE instead of FIVE and NINER instead of NINE and WUN instead of ONE.

when I was a copilot some captains told me to knock it off...but when I made captain I did it the right way.

I've heard people read back a clearance like: fl250, heading 250, 132.4 and not read their callsign. of course the wrong plane got it.

I had a japanese controller address an alpa conference and tell us all he didn't understand when a plane called for fire engines to standby...the thought that others don't call fire engines , fire engines is bothersome, but we must work together.

and the speed of speech is obviously above mach 1.0 in certain environments like LGA and ORD.

And slow flight at MACON TRACON.


But, we are still the best.

I recall flying in mexico from mexico city to san diego. We made position reports as it was non radar much of the way and I read off my position report in PTATEN fashion...the mexican controller just responded with the last two letters of my call sign...ROMEO PAPA...that was it...He didn't say who he was, or that he heard anything, he just said the last two letters of my N number.


When in Rome, be a roman candle

When in Rome, do as the romans do


When in the USA, do like the Americans do.

Got the first two, but WUN for ONE? How do you yanks pronounce wun/one?? ;)

I'm glad you're time in the cooler hasn't affected your ego sevenstrokeroll.

Welcome back. ;)

Don't forget to duck
 

Con Pilot...Don't forget to duck after lobbing a grenade like that:)

For those outside the US (and maybe those inside) this is how it works here, and works very well, thank you.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7947104/DD2.mp3

The anatomy of a communications breakdown in interpreting a taxi clearance from ATC by an air carrie... - NASA ASRS

Interesting incident report and its best quote in my view:

Did you intend for that to be used as an example of the efficacy of US r/t?

It is , in fact, an excellent example of poor r/t!

Very non standard and verbose - i would estimate 25% unnecessary words and how many times does he say "no delay"??
How many correct readbacks? Did the atco check any?

I intended it to be an example of the real world.

Well, considering the references to "Eastern" and "PSA", the recording is over 25 years old.

Sounds to me like the Controller was "In Control".

sounded to me like the controller was working VERY hard and improvising
unnecessarily.

I think you've missed the point of this thread. :hmm:

acroguy
 

It works very well for who? You? Your compatriots? Who else matters eh on this big planet eh?

You are missing the point entirely by not taking on board the fact that its not how well it works for "native" ears that counts. Of course most native English speakers can understand and by understood no matter how gash and unprofessional the RT. However the whole point of standard phraseology is to accommodate and make life safer for EVERYBODY.

Most developed countries who don't have English as their first language make a good stab at keeping it standard (ish), yes there are local nuances and accents and some non-standardisms used, but on the whole they try. What many people outside of the US can't quite grasp is why go out of your way to sound gash when flying at home or elsewhere, when there are clear guidelines set out and being native English speakers its easier for you than most.

So many times through this thread guys from N America use the defence that it "works just fine" "we're ok with it" "yeah but we're the best" "what about you anal lot over there!" blah blah. What sort of defence is that for disregarding rules that most of the world signs up to?

It comes across as pure 100% arrogance.

For balance I've flown a lot in the US and enjoy it immensely and have utmost respect for ATC especially at the bigger hubs, I'm in no way questioning anyone's ability, I just don't understand why it's not easier for ALL to stick to the script to make it easier and SAFER as well as simpler for EVERYONE.

After reading all the arrogant comments by non-Americans in this thread, all I have to say is; 'Now that is funny and I don't care who you are'. :p

There is an old saying that this thread reminds me of; 'If ain't broke, don't fix it.'

Do please carry on. :ok:

Woooooooosssssshhhhhh

The sound of the point going straight over the top of someone's head...again. :ugh:

Summary of this thread to date:

We all do it this way. You have to do it our way.

No. We like our way.

We all got together and voted that you do it our way.

No. Your way isn't our way.

We don't like your way.

Tough. Stay away.

No. You have to do it our way.

Our way works fine.

Beside the point. Do it our way.

No.

Repeat, 430 times.

I think that is correct as to the vintage of the recording. However, except for the "Position and Hold" being replaced by "Line up and Wait", it is identical to current practice.

Not to further inflame the discussion, but here is a well-known recording of New York Approach. You will notice that there is really no time for perfect "ICAO approved" R/T but everybody is on the same page, including the foreign carriers.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...R-Approach.mp3

OBGRAHAM,
You really have missed the point. The USA negotiated some of and agreed to ICAO standards, they were not imposed externally, they are applicable to domestic and international traffic. Many American pilots appear to be unaware of them and many that are aware seem to delight in ignoring in them. This gives rise to doubt, uncertainty and inefficiency for non-American pilots when flying in the USA and for American pilots outside their own airspace. All of which is avoidable by respecting international agreements. Perhaps you have the same cavalier attitude to your checklists, although I hope not.

Con pilot
 

Thank you for single handedly confirming all I suspected!........Frightening. :eek:

I'm glad you're unlikely to be flying me anywhere soon, your skills may not be dangerous, even your RT may not be dangerous.......your attitude however.......

YEEEEE HAHH Cowboy!

I blame Hollywood. :ugh:

They are just jealous of us Yanks.
I can't believe they are not blaming the recent over runs in Asia on non standard American R/T.....
It's all right. They know more than we do. But here is the rub with that. We invented flying; we have the most complex, busiest and safest airpsace system in the world. We are the real deal, and you jealous gents (Aussies, Canucks, and Kiwi's excluded) are just but a cheap shiny import.

TheBigD, sorry to wee on you breakfast cereal, but there were plenty of other manned flights before the USA was even discovered. Now, if you were to say that you invented powered flight, most of us would tend to believe you although the facts are arguable.

As for the rest, US aviation seems to have had a couple of embarrassing moments recently (bent 737 nose leg, UPS landing somewhat short and a rather surreal fire engine/survivor encounter).

Sure, everything must be absolutely fine and dandy over there.

Right, must go back to my potato famine.......... :bored:

So, you are not a pilot. But yet you assume that you are an authority on ATC issues around the world. :hmm:

That sir, speaks volumes. And once again, 'That is funny and I don't care who you are.' :p

As for this snotty little comment;

No sir, I am not a cowboy, I am a retired pilot with over 42 years of experience and have over 21,000 hours of flying time. I flew all over the world, including Great Britain many times and around the world. I never damaged an aircraft and never had a violation. One could say a perfect record.

How about you?

Hey BigD,

How right you are and how kind to remind us of your humility. Why then, after showing us all how it's done when you layed down the rules through ICAO, don't you do it the way you showed us? Have you forgotten already? Is that too difficult?

BigD
 

You really are hilarious. You "invented flying" and are basically the best so nobody else knows anything!?

Nobody (sensible) is claiming who is better/worse or who invented what. What a cringeworthy and embarrassing defence that is to completely ignore what YOUR regulatory body have signed up to (and probably helped devise).

As far as I can gather nobody is saying we know it all and you're all useless, just that there is a convention that most of the world try and stick to other than you. Why don't you stick to it? Because you guys are the best and know more than anyone so why would you need to.

Again the arrogance is breathtaking. :eek:

He drove to the airport without getting a traffic violation? ;)

UK to Dalaman, (which is probably Daily Dalamn's routing) has probably 5 or 6 different countries to overfly (depending on routing), each with their own language. Thank goodness all of them have heard of ICAO and understand the need for standardised RT. Otherwise the result would be horrendous.

Con Pilot
 

Yes I am a pilot so therefore feel suitably qualified to comment thanks very much.

But given the fact that I don't work in your country I'm unlikely to fly WITH you anytime soon. Therefore it would only be as pax and as i haven't planned anymore holidays this year that isn't going to happen.

Is that really so difficult for you to comprehend before jumping to the 100% incorrect conclusion? Interesting that confusion can occur when communications aren't absolutely clear eh?

How ironic, but thanks for highlighting point beautifully! :ok:

Beardy:

Indeed as have you. There has not been any new point raised in this thread, now surpassing 450 posts. You all keep making the same argument, and we keep responding the same, often hyperbolic way.

Nothing new here.