B773 at Paris on Apr 5th, airplane did not respond to commands

It's essentially the same everywhere, but these large planes are flying IFR not VFR and so they rely on the separation service provided by ground control. Ground control isn't allowed to provide separation service to VFR flights (although you can ask them for an advisory, and they will tell you about traffic that is relevant to you).

These aren't bush pilots. They're professional airline transport pilots. Their job requires a proficient level of aviation English.

I've never heard of the English rule being ignored anywhere else except perhaps at tiny airports without proper radio discipline. Though I was only a private pilot.

It's not that it has to be in English because it's meant to be a better language. It's because the international community chose it. English is a requirement because lives were lost because of this (think Avianca 52). Foreign pilots have to do a language test to get their license. Even for a PPL. At least here in Europe.

Also the phraseology of radio communication is pretty specific and even a native English speaker wouldn't make heads or tails of it if they have no knowledge of aviation. It isn't really English as such.

It's no coincidence that the French invented the word Chauvinism :) I the multinational company I work for I've never seen a people so angered at having to speak another language than the French.

Sounds like a scene from The Man In The High Castle.

Your question backfires: Americans are used to being humiliated by their employers and see nothing wrong with the hypothetical.

Still mandatory to be proficient in English. EASA makes everyone pass an English exam, including private pilots.

The following are direct quotes from the blog post:

> So, out of the seven KAL crashes that happened in the 20 year span between 1978 and 1997, three were a result of a military or paramilitary attack. Those three crashes clearly have little to do with pilot skills. […] that Gladwell would use incidents of terrorist attacks to pad the stats is darn near offensive. It is as if New York is being described as extra-dangerous in the early 2000s by including the number of deaths from the 9/11 attacks. > Take a look at p. 204 of the report, which shows the point at which the pilots initiate their landing check sequence, thinking that they must be near the airport. For the next five pages--which ends with the moment of the crash--the pilots are communicating almost entirely in English. […] Gladwell explains that the new COO of Korean Air, David Greenberg (a former Delta Air Lines executive,) solved all the difficulties caused by the ambiguous Korean language by requiring the pilots to speak only in English. Gladwell writes: "In English, [the pilots] would be free of the sharply defined gradients of Korean hierarchy . . . Instead, the pilots could participate in a culture and language with a very different legacy." But Gladwell never reveals that Korean Air pilots were already speaking mostly in English, although that fact was absolutely plain from the transcript.

CRM is a hard skill to learn. It sounds easy on paper, but it goes against everything you've ever learned for how to have polite social interactions. Imagine you're an intern watching someone like Jeff Dean give a live demo, and you think the presentation is proceeding in a way that is going to cause a major outage. What do you do? I'm guessing that 99% of the time, you're not going to say anything. "He knows what he's doing" "It's not appropriate for me to interrupt a senior engineer's demo". Defeating that intuition is what CRM training aims to eliminate, and it takes a lot of work to override that hardcoded human behavior. (Even for Americans. I imagine it's even harder for Koreans.)

I'd really like to see # of hours of CRM training (and total training!) company wide vs. fatal accidents, and dig in even deeper to see if the training was even any good. (You could give every pilot 10 hours of bad training, and it wouldn't help the accident rate.)

Anyway, I'm sure someone has these numbers. My guess is that much more work was done than saying "just speak English" and the problem was magically fixed.

The real L, as they say on Twitter now, is that we went so far on making scientific knowledge the only valid kind of knowing that fabulists must now come disguised as science (whereas in the past we all knew what Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, von Daniken etc were all about and could enjoy them for what they were).

I didn't see a rebuttal which substantially affected his argument. Most of it was the typical bandwagoning against his pop-style storytelling method. Very few disputes of fact. If Gladwell is guilty of anything it is to place a finely tuned modernly biased reference frame onto past events that did not/could not exist at the time but do become increasingly visible with the benefit of hind sight in a way that helps readers connect today with lessons from the past. Call that inauthentic if you will, but I think there are valuable insights to be gained and am glad he reaches such a wide audience in spite of the intellectual backlashing.

that is a very memorable incident - not least for the number of lives lost. I am not sure if it was deference as much as reverting to a native speech pattern in a critical moment.

"We are at takeoff" is what the pilot said and a native English speaker would have said something more like "We are taking off". A subtle difference - I grok what he was saying after the fact but in the moment the other's understanding was something like 'the KLM plane is currently at the starting point for takeoff'.

All these are just guesses on my part - I think of this incident often, particularly in terms of clarity and 'closed loop' comms under stress.

https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/

> It was exported to Japan (Senpai and kōhai is a direct model of Korean sunbae, hoobae) ...

Hmm I don't exactly know which way the terms were exported, but many people blame modern Korea's ageism on colonial Japan (at least partially), where the Japanese Empire tried to run itself as grandiose military barracks and trained everyone to be subject to the social hierarchy. Rigid hierarchy and hazing was a huge problem in the Imperial Japanese military.

The Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) had numerous issues but actually ageism wasn't as prevalent. Confucian scholars regularly made friends with each other over five or ten years of age difference. (You may think "so what?" but that pretty much never happens among students in modern Korea.)

Also, one reason that Joseon allowed Japanese landing at the start of the invasion of 1592 was that that division of the navy was led by Won Gyun, one of the worst admirals in Korea's history. Shortly after the war began he ordered his own fleet burned and ran away.

(Later, the legendary Yi Sunshin was imprisoned after being framed by Japanese espionage, and Won became the commander again. He then sailed the whole Korean fleet into a death trap at the battle of Chilcheonnyang, losing almost the entire fleet. Won ran away and likely died. We don't know exactly what happened to him.)

It isn't based on individual age. I know Korean cousins with a 20 year age difference where the younger one gets the honorific because his lineage is older and he's an earlier generation. They never speak Korean with each other.

The problem was that they didn't know the right phrases to declare an emergency. They kept saying "we're running out of fuel, sir". But meant they had not enough to go around.

Though I do agree that good airmanship would have been to tell ATC no and land the plane. A pilot may do that if lives are at risk.

Sadly, there was a compounding issue that the pilots didn’t declare an emergency or divert when they were running out of fuel. They thought asking for “priority” was sufficient, when the word has more urgency in their native language than it does in English. :(

New York controllers were more abrasive than they were used to and they had trouble speaking up. The controllers also didn’t communicate well amongst themselves and the pilots didn’t know their request for a sooner landing to due low fuel was not passed on.

Ultimately, the problem was the pilot’s failure to follow procedures. With the controllers being disorganized either due to lack of procedure or failure to follow it. Either of them could have prevented it.

Note: It is not sufficient to blame the pilots and move on. People make mistakes. Both sides need to be improved, because single points of failure kill people.

It’s not so much that they deviate from the norm (quite the opposite, there’s a manual that dictates exact phraseology), it’s just that there’s SO MUCH traffic that they don’t have time to hold hands, and they expect you to be competent. In other words, there’s very little time or room for error, and that can come off as rudeness.

It is always the pilot’s prerogative to overrule ATC (if there’s a legitimate reason) and/or declare an emergency. And I assure you NY ATC would take it seriously if you do. They just don’t have time to dance around.

> Are air traffic controllers even normally from the area where they work? Don't they get assigned?

They are highly specialized on local facilities, weather, traffic flows, etc. The New York Metro area is one, if not the, most complicated airspace’s to control in the world. 4 major international airports (and tons of smaller airports/heliports) surrounding dense major cities with complicated weather, noise abatement procedures, and high congestion.

There are dozens of air traffic controllers of all different seats (supervisors, arrivals, ground, towers, helicopters) in the region. It’s a lot of coordinate.

This video gives a nice 3 minute overview: https://www.faa.gov/tv/?mediaId=1042

In my experience the NY ATC can be brusque in a way that can border on the unprofessional, and they tend to have an accent that can be hard to understand if you're not from there and you're listening on your crappy AM aviation radio. I assume that would go double for a non-native speaker of English.

In the rest of the country that I've flown in, the controllers seem to be aiming for the voice of bored Apollo mission controllers.

There are JFK ATC conversations on youtube. Even I, an native English speaker but not American, have difficulty understanding them sometimes. They also sometimes come across as being dicks, but obviously only the audience-worthy conversations get uploaded

Source: I'm a flight instructor :-) the rule you're looking for is FCL.055

It specifies that you cannot use your license privileges unless you have a language endorsement on your license for English or the language used for RT for that flight. So if you have not passed an English test you are only allowed to fly in French airspace and speak French.

Maybe the French authorities will issue you a basic PPL without LPE, assuming you'll only fly in France. But many other CAAs will not issue licenses like that, and some won't renew a license without it even if you historically got it without LPE.

Are you instrument-rated? I believe it's an EU legal requirement for you to demonstrate functional competency in English for an instrument rating now.

At least in Europe you won't even get your PPL without an English proficiency test.

Unless you're born in the UK or Ireland that is. Because you're deemed native.

Hey be nice, southern accents might be kind of weird, but technically people from Georgia (the state) speak English.

Common language is always needed - this is CDG, a large airport with many flights. It is important that all planes have situational awareness. If half are speaking French, how does the pilot coming from Seoul have situational awareness? What if he's sitting on the runway and doesn't know that the ATC just gave clearance to land in French to a pilot on the runway he's currently on?

ATC and pilots for commercial airlines should only be speaking English, regardless of their native tongue and where they are.

It's pretty important - and it is actually EU law: https://www.thinkspain.com/news-spain/29531/air-traffic-cont...

Unfortunately it only applies to airports with 50k international flights per year - the bar should be much lower than that. But of course, CDG qualifies.

It disengages when you fight it. With the associated and very recognizable autopilot disengage sound. I'm sure there is more to this story than "crew mistake" as some seem to imply here.

I'm absolutely not knowledgeable on this topic so double check everything I say.

I think the issue on the 737 Max was that there's been a known and studied system (called the MCAS IIRC) on Boeing planes that overrides pilot controls under some specific pre-determined circumstances and that system had been buffed to compensate for design flaws that were discovered too late to be corrected. On top of being faulty, that buffed system was also way outside of its initial intent and purpose (or rather the parameters guiding its operation were changed so much that it should have been addressed as a separate system and mandated specific training while they were trying to portray the plane as a simple evolution requiring no pilot re-training from earlier versions of the 737).

So, to me, it looks like yet another issue with a system overriding pilot controls for whatever reason.

More generally, this falls into that weird pattern of relying on external sensors which starts a chain of bad decisions leading to accidents (this was also a sensor issue with the Air France 447, although the chain was largely human this time, the pilots realizing way too late their repeated mistake).

The official way of saying numbers in French is to spell each digit separately and 1 is "unité". So 011 is zéro, unité, unité.

However if it is clear enough and there is no ambiguity, the common way of saying numbers can be used, so zéro onze is acceptable. In normal conditions, no french speaker will mistake "onze" for "un", the latter should be "unité" anyways.

The main problem with "un" is that it sounds like "hein?", which means something like "huh?", the kind of meaningless words that punctuate conversations without even noticing.

French military radio procedures also have specific pronunciations to disambiguate words. The fact that it is not used (assuming it is not) in ATC radio is not a feature of the French language.

Are you a native french speaker? I'm fluent in a couple languages and all but my native one are insanely hard to understand over radio. Even with the special pronunciations there are a lot of nearly indistinguishable sounds in english, and I'm not sure those sounds are even apparent to a non-native speaker who isn't specifically trained in them. It's very possible they are using an equivalent but we can't hear it without some practice.

Especially when it comes to numbers!

The other day I asked for direction at a front desk and the lady told me to go to the office # "trente quatre vingt", I wasn't sure whether that was "3420" or "3080".

> This is a completely reasonable response.

Lol, no, you specifically called out the response that referenced AI, but now you're saying you didn't understand any of them? Sounds like you need to take a breath, relax, and stop shit-posting. Even your excuses are incoherent.

Let's leave the incident investigation to the professional investigators anf authorities, shall we?

Damn son you got it