Miscommunication between pilots and air traffic control;Miskomunikado inter pilotoj kaj aertrafikaj registoj;Erreurs de communication entre les pilotes et les controleurs au sol du trafic aerien

Language Problems and Language Planning

Volumn 27, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 233-248

  Jones, R Kent ^a  

^a NONE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 11144312319     PISSN: 02722690     EISSN: 15699889     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1075/lplp.27.3.03jon     Document Type: Article

References (38)

1. Ammer, Christine. American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Houghton Mifflin Company, New York. 1997. A listing and explanation of 10,000 American idioms.
2. Aviation Publishing Group, http://www.avweb.com/sitemap/NewsWire (see News and Features) carries news of fatal and non-fatal incidents and many supplemental comments.
3. Aviation Safety Network. http://aviation-safety.net/index.shtml. This site covers more accidents than www.planecrashinfo.com (see Kebabjian, below) because the latter is limited to crashes with fatalities. This site contains transcripts of cockpit voice recorders.
4. Aviation Safety Reporting System, http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/report_sets_nf.htm. These groups of reports on 28 topics include communications. The home page is http://asrs.arc.nasa.-gov/main.htm.
5. BEA, http://www.bea-fr.org/anglaise/index.htm. BEA (Bureau d’Enquêtes d’Analyses pour la Sécurité de l’Aviation Civile) is the bureau of enquiry into accidents for France. This site is the English language version, and has many useful links to similar organizations elsewhere.
6. Billings, Charles E. & E. S. Cheaney. 1981. Information Transfer Problems in the Aviation System. NASA Technical Paper 1875. Moffett Field, California: NASA. Examines 6,527
7. Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) reports over an eleven-year period. Some 5,402 had information transfer problems in at least one often categories. They include messages misinterpretable through phonetic similarity, inaccurate through transposition, ambiguous phraseology, and garbled phraseology.
8. Buck, Robert N. 1994. The Pilot’s Burden. Ames: Iowa State University Press. Chapter 12 is titled “Air Traffic Control: The Big Squeeze.” Buck shows how the cognitive demands on pilots have increased over the years. An excellent bibliography is included.
9. Crane, Dale. 1997. Dictionary of Aeronautical Terms. 3rd ed. Newcastle, Washington: Aviation Supplies and Academics. 7,400 entries.
10. Crocker, David. 1999. Dictionary of Aeronautical English. London: Peter Collin Publishing. Differences between British and American usage are apparent.
11. Crystal, David. 1997. English as a Global Language. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. According to Crystal (p. 101), “An accident prevention study carried out by Boeing found that, in the decade 1982-1991, pilot-controller miscommunication contributed to at least 11 percent of the fatal crashes worldwide. People have used cases of this kind to argue in support of bilingual air traffic control, or the use of a simpler auxiliary language such as Esperanto.”
12. Curtis, Todd. 2000. Understanding Aviation Safety Data. Warrendale, Pa.: Society of Automotive Engineers.
13. Cushing, Steven. 1988. Language and Communication-related Problems of Aviation Safety. ERIC ED 296-595. Discussion of confusion over the word “hold” in the 17 Feb. 1981 accident in California (see above). Notes the ambiguity of the sentence, “Flying planes can be dangerous.” Cites four types of causes of near-misses due to numerical confusion between headings, flight levels, vectors, two/to, and airspeed.
14. Cushing, Steven. 1994. Fatal Words: Communication Clashes and Aircraft Crashes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1994. The subtitle was chosen to illustrate an aspect of the problem. Are the words “clashes” and “crashes” forms of the present tense or plural nouns?
15. Cushing, Steven. 1995. Pilot-air traffic control communications: It’s not (only) what you say, it’s how you say it. Flight Safety Digest, 14/7. An excellent review of NASA studies.
16. Faith, Nicholas. BlackBox: Why Safety is no Accident. London: Macmillan. “Despite repeated proof that clear communication is vital, the problem remains unresolved.” p.49.
17. Federal Aviation Administraton, http://www1.faa.gov/ats/. This web page can take the reader to the Glossary and to Air Traffic Control.
18. Flight Safety Foundation, http://www.flightsafety.org/home.html. Via this web page one may reach several series of publications. The CFIT (Controlled-flight-into-terrain) Checklist, in its risk assessment, gives a minus-20 rating to flights wherein controllers and pilots speak different primary languages, or spoken English is poor.
19. Goguen, J.A. & C. Linde. 1983. Linguistic Methodology for the Analysis of Aviation Accidents. NASA Contractor Report 3741. Moffett Field, California: NASA. Deals primarily with communication within the flight crew.
20. Hobbs, James B. 1999. Homophones and Homographs. 3rd ed. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland. Cites 7,870 homophones and 1,554 homographs.
21. Illman, Paul E. 1999. The Pilot’s Air Traffic Control Handbook. New York: McGraw-Hill. Chapter 3 gives details of 10 cases of failure. A long list of acronyms and abbreviations illustrates how many details pilots are obligated to know.
22. Illman, Paul E. 1998. The Pilot’s Radio Communications Handbook. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill. Notable example of potential confusion: the decimal point is given for radio frequencies, but omitted in altimeter settings.
23. International Civil Aviation Organization. http://icao.int/. This is the branch of the United Nations Organization which deals with aviation.
24. Kebabjian, Richard. http://planecrashinfo.com/ (accessed May 13, 2003). Kebabjian’s copyrighted site contains fatal accidents classified by date and numerous other characteristics, including aircraft type, airline operator, aircraft specifications. Includes links, references, and a search engine.
25. MacPherson, Malcolm, ed. 1998. The Black Box. New York: William Morrow. Features analyses of 28 accidents.
26. Mills, Thomas S. 1999. The Pilot’s Reference to ATC Procedures and Phraseology. 7th ed. Van Nuty, California: ReAVCO Publishing. Contains listings of 335 air traffic control phrases, 164 acronyms, and 49 phrases which differ between the FAA and ICAO.
27. National Science Foundation. Survey of the State of the Art in Human Language Technology: http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/HLTsurvey/HLTsurvey.html.
28. National Transportation Board, http://www.ntsb.gov/default.htm. This page gives direct access to official accident reports. No linguist is required to sign as approving these reports, hence no formal attention is paid to the degree to which miscommunication contributes to accidents.
29. Prinzo, O.V. 1996. An Analysis of Approach Control/Pilot Voice Communications. Oklahoma City: Civil Aeromedical Institute, Federal Aviation Administration. 40 percent of the 2,500 controller “communication elements” contained at least one communication error. For pilots, the figures were 59 percent of 5,900.
30. Ramos, Robert A. & Burnfield, Jennifer L., ed. 1999. Air Traffic Control English Language Project (ATCLEP) Reports I and II. Alexandria, Virginia: Human Resources Research Organization. These reports were prepared under contract with the FAA. On page 37 it is estimated that 16 weeks of training at 20-30 classroom hours per week are needed to bring a foreign pilot or controller from a basic level 1 up to an acceptable level of 2.
31. Robertson, F.A. 1995. Airspeak: Radiotelephony Communication for Pilots. [with 6 tapes]. New York: Prentice Hall International.
32. Robinson, Christine & Carol Ann Crawford. 2001. Scotspeak: A Guide to the Pronunciation ofModern Urban Scots. Perth, Scotland: Scots Language Resource Centre. This form of English may be the clearest for universal use in aviation.
33. Ruffell Smith, H.P. 1979. A Simulator Study of the Interaction of Pilot Workload with Errors, Vigilance and Decisions. NASA Technical Memorandum 78-182. Moffet Field, California: NASA.
34. Stewart, John. 1989. Avoiding Common Pilot Errors. New York: TAB/AERO Books (McGraw-Hill). “We frequently use words that have more than one meaning in the English language, and use them in a context that does not specifically define which meaning is being used.” p. 17. Examples are the words “right” and “clear.”
35. Suonuuti, Heidi. 1997. Guide to Terminology. The Finnish Centre for Technical Terminology for NORDTERM 8. 1997. Based on the author’s experience with the terminology-creation methods of the International Standards Organization.
36. Trudgill, Peter & Jean Hannah. 1994. International English: A Guide to Varieties of Standard English. 3rded. London: Edward Arnold. Itemizes the many basic differences of English dialects, including differences of pronunciation, grammar, spelling, and word meanings between American and British Englishes.
37. Uplinger, S. 1997. English-language training for air traffic controllers must go beyond basic ATC vocabulary. Airport Operations (Flight Safety Foundation) 23/5. Notes that many non-routine situations needing communication occur in aviation. Favorably mentions a 300-hour Russian course for controllers.
38. Woerth, Duane. 2000. Statement of Captain Duane Woerth, President, Air Line Pilots Association International, before the Subcommittee on Aviation, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, US House of Representatives, on Issues Arising out of the Crash of Egypt Air 990, April 11, at http://www.house.gov/transportation/aviation/hearing/04-11-00/woerth.html.