Yes, once again all perfectly true. But if it's all right with you, I won't be putting money on our Lithuanian friends.

This may have been a case of "ignorance is bliss" among the Pax. The good news is that the crew missed the ground / waved off / went around. Close one. :uhoh::eek:

I don't think I have ever heard French ATC using the ridiculously un-phonetic "un" "une" or "onze"
Give them their due all I recall is the unmistakable "unité".

Despite the fact the buggers should have been speaking English in the first place...

Doublecheck my arithmetic, but it seems to me had the PF delayed the go-around actions by only half a second more, they would have touched down short. At -717FPM at DH, that's pretty much exactly 12' / second vertically. The reason they took 9 seconds to initiate the GA is another matter entirely, though, and they should count their lucky stars it was open fields under the approach, rather than a substantial obstacle.

To think that in this day and age a ("relatively") modern airliner came within half a second of CFIT due to confusion, from whatever source, about 1011 / 1001 is unacceptable. I well know the HF at play, including the French ATC speaking French, but a single slip should not result in something like this.

Then again, missing a single step in a single procedure did cause BHP to have the biggest derailment in history in terms of terms of tonnes, size and speed - but the rail industry is decades behind aviation in terms of HF & safety culture. :ugh:

I kindly refer to post #4 (@A320lgw - n.b.) and my best scared guess is they actually did see 'something'. And hence the belated G/A at last, MK1 eyeball might just saved many lives.

Also interesting to learn about the history of crew with the operator. All of AviaSolution is hiring like crazy and people out of currency line up in drowes.

The "smart landing" EGPWS add-on includes an "Altimeter setting" alert- if there is a disagreement between GPS and indicated altitude (and it knows the transition level) it gives a voice annunciation. Hated the system except for this feature, which should probably be a requirement for Baro-based approaches.

If someone else has raised the point, my apologies for missing it.

We old chaps might wonder why a significant discrepancy between forecast/ATIS and advised QNH did not present an immediate red flag "need to query" requirement to the crew ?

A GPS Altitude vs Baro Altitude warning system is incorporated in the EGPWS enhancement known as Runway Awareness and Advisory System (RAAS).

https://skybrary.aero/articles/runwa...ry-system-raas

See section 2.3 of the manual here:

https://skybrary.aero/sites/default/...shelf/1974.pdf

Raised but not verbalized.

There are about 5 operators in the owners group. AvEx and Lynx pay about 8000 EUR/m invoiced during the summer, and 80/blh in winter if they call you.

GetJet probably pays around 2000/m less than that.

Recency, proficiency, skill and talent. Why would you not go work for the better paying companies in the group is the​​​ razor question.

Whoever signed GJ is complicit.

​​​​​FO probably on 1100 EUR/m

out of the window
 

Just wondering: at 6 ft from the ground.....did anyone look out of the window ??

From an ATC point of view : first it would help if people would read the BEA report before making comments and wrong statements here, but it is probably too much to ask.
From the report : Communications with the flight were in English and only in English , QNH was passsed according English phraseology 1 0 0 1 and 1 0 1 1 , digit per digit . So it is not an dual language issue.
The LOC controller had a mental fixation on the wrong QNH and passed it to at least 2 aircraft ( and I would bet probably more during his shift ) it happens .But he/she should not have been alone on his position and his/her assistamt should have picked it up .It did not happen.
The controller twice did not use correct pharesology on the MSAW alerts, . That is a training issue . Serious and need to be corrected.
Finally the APP lights were not on and should have been. Another training issue combined with a lack of supervisory oversight. .
Not a good day for CDG . I hope they learn from it .

Yeh thats probably it. God knows CFIT never happened "back in my day".

Bollocks it isn't a dual language issue.

From the report:
1134:28, incorrect QNH issued to NSZ4311 in English
1135:37, incorrect QNH issued to EJU75MA in English
1136:04, correct QNH issued to AFR crew in French.

Had the controller used English for that 3rd transmission, which was less than 30 seconds, and probably closer to 15-20 seconds after her incorrect call to the EasyJet crew, there's every chance at least they, if not both of them would have queried them about it, "Hey, bud, you just gave us 1011 but Air France 1001 - which is it?"

Sure, they might not have picked it up either, but the whole point of the entire planet using English for aviation is to avoid mistakes and allow others to pick up on them should they occur.

I'm guessing from the language you are using, you speak English. There's a reasonable amount of people that don't. Some of them live in countries bigger than the USA and the EU combined, and making the pilots in those countries speak English to the controllers there would probably lead to a lot of problems. I am all in favor of using one language in aviation until I realize that there's probably more Hindi and Mandarin native speaking pilots than English.

Which raises the question, why is the MAWS response not 'go-around' rather than 'check terrain, QNH blah blah' - by the time the crew do all this could well be catastrophic!

If only there was a STANDARDISED language like lets say English, so that these things do not happen. Let me real quick learn Mandarin on my way to Beijing.

English is the most spoken language in the world, and the language of the people who literally invented powered flight.

https://www.ethnologue.com/guides/most-spoken-languages
https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world

There is absolutely no reason to change the international language of aviation.

Correct, the standardised language in PRC is Mandarin, English accepted.

English is the only golden standard for international ops, which really CDG should have embraced long ago.

In the presented case, it is but a one very thin slice of cheese that got removed because of this.

Some great contributions upthread already, amidst the frog bashing screams.

I may be SLF but I am also a professional interpreter and translator.

Whatever the language, when humans are involved it is not merely code that will always be processed exactly the same way. I understand ATC procedures are designed to make communications as code-like as possible but so long as people are involved, other factors will come into play. This limitation needs to be understood.

There is nothing more painful in my trade than hearing two native speakers of the same non-English language talk to each other in English. They will never achieve the same degree of communication as in their own native language and there's a degree of unnaturalness about it that is inherently frustrating.

I appreciate the potential benefit of other pilots being able to listen in and spot errors, but I'm asking myself whether that actually happens and how often it is actually useful.

As others have hinted, I invite those on here for whom English is their native language to imagine landing at an airport in an English-speaking country and being required to conduct communications with the ATC in a learned foreign language. Can you see the problem? Language isn't just code.

In all my previous airlines we used to preset the QNH when receiving Atis in cruise or early descent, meaning going from STD to QNH, setting the airport QNH and the going back to STD till transition altitude.
That way, when going through transition altitude, you had only to switch from STD to QNH and adjust for the 1 or 2 mb possible change for the last 20 mins.

With this procedure I’m pretty sure that a 10 mb change to what had been preset would have at least raised an eyebrow….