Watching Captain Joe’s videos has spawned a few questions I haven’t been able to get answered in the comments (probably cause they were old videos) sections of the relevant videos.
How do pilots handle the all the different accents you encounter flying to different countries? Some of the videos include snippets of radio chatter. I can barely make out what they’re saying most of the time, and that’s with mild or no accents and a prior explanation of what they’re saying. Being familiar with radio chatter and that type of conversation in general (usually going to be saying the same sorts of things) can go a long way, and a lot conversations are checklists or standard procedures where you kind of know what they’re going to say next.
You’ve pretty much answered your own question here. I used to tell my flight students that 90% of radio communications is formulaic. I have a good idea of what’s going to be said to me and how I will need to respond. Students sometimes have a hard time believing that, particularly in busy airspace.
The example I give is my friend Ted who is a waiter at a high end restaurant, the kind where the servers don’t write anything down. He can stand at a table of a dozen people and take everyone’s order, no problem. It’s impressive when you see it, but he points out a few things:
He knows the menu
Most of the time people are going to order what’s on the menu
He has experience
Radio comm in a plane is very similar. Throw in a foreign accent and you get more “say agains”. Once or twice I’ve had to ask for clarification of procedures you see in some parts of the world, but not in the States very often (DME arcs, for example). But overall, the system is fairly well standardized (thanks ICAO), although that standardization occasionally causes its own problems, but that’s another topic.
There’s also the point that when dealing with ATC, yours is just one of multiple aircraft - so you typically get to hear controllers saying to others what they will soon be saying to you.
That’s a 1. The multi-pilot flight time is 01:27, as is the total time of flight. It’s common to cross the figure 7 to differentiate it from the figure 1.
I seem to remember seeing a list somewhere of English words that air traffic controllers around the world need to know; ‘climb’, ‘descend’, ‘maintain’, etc. I can’t find it now, but it was shorter than I expected.
My German friends all made their '1’s to look rather like a carat ‘^’. There’s a little tick or serif (don’t know what else to call it) at the top of a 1. Most American omit that entirely when they’re writing, so a ‘1’ just looks like a vertical bar. In Germany (don’t know about the rest of Europe) that tick has become elongated. When they’re printing in a hurry, it can look an awful lot like a 7. I think the barred 7 is used to distinguish it from a German 1.
Yeah. I also do that even though I wasn’t taught to as a kid. The notch on the 1 I haven’t really caught on to. Also, for the same purpose of reducing ambiguity, I use a 24-hour clock. Am I some sort of wacky Euro-phile?
Nope. Just an American who appreciates sensible things. Metric system, I’m ready for you whenever everyone else catches up!
For what it’s worth, I was once waiting for a flight out of Madagascar, talking to whomever I could talk to. A local airport man told me that Aeroflot had its own flight control man, who did nothing but wait for the weekly Aeroflot flight, and then sit in to talk in the pilot, in Russian. Anybody know if that was ever true, or still is?
I don’t know if it’s still the case (it’s 10 years since I have flown), but in my experience of flying GA throughout Europe and the U.S., controllers (and pilots) in the U.S. are by far the most lax about following standard phraseology. I think it’s really something that should be addressed in the U.S, with ATC setting the example. The French (no surprise) are terrible at sticking to English - or even speaking English at all at some GA airfields.
I think serif is the correct term. I know serif refers to the tiny feet added to certain letters (e.g. h, m, n, r) in some fonts (known simply as serifed fonts) like Courier New.
Here’s the video that inspired the question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DT3FZnoO2f4&t=36s. I can’t quite catch what the captain is saying. Joe would be hard to understand if I weren’t used to his voice from other videos (points to another way pilots handle the issue: just being accustomed to people they regularly talk to).
In both cases, it’s mostly due to the poor audio quality and/or cockpit noise. I’m assuming the audio quality is a function of the radio/intercom, and not the recording equipment or the recording itself.
For precision, you 1) cross your sevens so they can’t be mistaken for 1s, b) slash your zeros so they won’t be mistaken for the letter “O”, iii) cross your zees so they’re not mistaken for a 2, and 4th) make your fours with a small capital L and a large lower case l with a gap between the top of the L and the l, so it won’t get mistaken for a 9.
I use, when I can. the US Military version. Today is 30 OCT 17. You use the first 3 letters of the month’s name. 24 hour time so there’s no am, pm, or noon, midnight confusion.
I use month/day/year although I admit day/month/year kind of makes more sense because it’s ordered by increasing length.
Told ya I’m not some wacky Euro-phile!
Basically with all this stuff I guess I do what everyone does… I use the method that feels right to me. Whether it’s because that’s what I was taught, or it is what is commonly used in my area/country, or it’s something I adopted because it felt “more sensible” to me.
I covered a lot of sky flying with the USAF. With all due respect to the wonderful people of South Korea, I had the hardest time understanding their air traffic controllers. On multiple occasions we would receive a clearance of some sort, and everyone in the cockpit would look at each other and shrug … “Did anyone get that?” I asked for more repeats of ATC instructions flying into and out of SK than any other place on the globe.
Next would be French ATC - I honestly think they did it on purpose
