10 ms·

Expecting a lot of armchair NTSB investigators to rock up here, but honestly not much indication on what happened until the appropriate authorities can pull the

by JCM9 5y ago

Expecting a lot of armchair NTSB investigators to rock up here, but honestly not much indication on what happened until the appropriate authorities can pull the data recorders out of the aircraft and see what was going on. Looking forward to reading what happened but until then… Interesting observation that the controllers and pilots were speaking French to each other. They’re really not supposed to do that (English is the standard for ATC, in part so other aircraft can maintain situational awareness) but that happens a lot in France.

radicaldreamer 5y ago
Korean Air had crash after crash until they forbid crew from speaking in Korean. Turns out cultural norms (highly hierarchical power structure) and honorifics were causing copilots to refrain from pointing out issues or pointing them out in an unclear way. A Colombian airline crashed in New York after running out of fuel due to similar deference to air traffic control.
- tapatio 5y ago
  "we request priority to land" vs. "we request emergency landing" is what led to the Colombian airlines disaster.
- anonu 5y ago
  The Colombian airline crash: they were speaking English though. NYC ATC is going to be brusque and quick... The new Yorker way. Not many cultures understand that...
  - giraffe_lady 5y ago
    ATC needs to be effective for all cultures that fly into that airport. If the new york one so deviates from the norm that it can cause crashes that is a very serious problem that needs to be addressed. That said I don't have any reason to think it actually does and you didn't supply one either. Are air traffic controllers even normally from the area where they work? Don't they get assigned?
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      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.
      - avar 5y ago
        Two airlines pilots failing to use the specific word "emergency" isn't a single point of failure. They then failed to tell passengers to brace before they crashed, which is thought to have contributed to injuries and even deaths.
        kayodelycaon 5y ago
        Not precisely, no. When it comes to pilot training or airline-wide problems, that becomes the point of failure. The whole point is creating a defense in depth so one factor can’t take down a plane.
    - secondcoming 5y ago
      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
    - cameldrv 5y ago
      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.
  - mattr47 5y ago
    All ATC should be brusque and quick, especially in high traffic environments. The US Army's ATC units had the motto of "Safe, Orderly, & Expeditious."
- mbubb 5y ago
  some years back I worked on a project with Korean Air on exactly that topic, cockpit communication and honorifics... A compounding factor was that pilots and crew often came from military backgrounds. I learned about a number of air disasters and PanAm/KLM crash[1] in Tenerife 1977 really stuck with me. In the transcript a Dutch pilot says something like "We are now at take off" when he was indicating that the plane was in the process of taking off. (an idiomatic way of expression) There was already much stress on the situation as an incident at another airport caused massive traffic rearrangement across Europe. Under stress we revert to native ways of expression. I tried to keep this incident in the back of my mind throughout the project, and since... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster edit - include the transcrpt: https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/ https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/
  - tomatowurst 5y ago
    What is really maddening about Korean neo-confucian society is this automatic social hierarchy based on your age, as if to suggest someone who is older than you is automatically infallible and has authority over you. It was exported to Japan (Senpai and kōhai is a direct model of Korean sunbae, hoobae) but it doesn't seem to practice Confucianism this strictly, there really is no other countries that take it this extremely. It reminds me of the Japanese invasion of Chosun dynasty, how the rigid military/confucian structure made communication impossible and largely allowed unopposed landings by Hideyoshi's army.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      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.
      - robocat 5y ago
        As a low-ranking middle aged average white guy from a small 1st world country: if I go to Korea can I get a status boost? I have seen low-rank white dudes get status upgrades in other Asian countries for a variety of reasons. One architect told me how he was hanging with high status Indonesians, and how he could name-drop NZ politicians (for example, the minister of finance) because our culture means low-rank citizens can personally know people in high-rank positions. Perhaps I can manipulate the Korean status game in my favour because my background is somewhat unmeasurable.
- The5thElephant 5y ago
  That was a Malcolm Gladwell theory that has been debunked, particularly here: http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-and-airplane.html http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-... In general I tend to question much of Gladwell's ideas these days seeing how many of them have been demonstrated to be wrong.
  - radicaldreamer 5y ago
    Aw man, this is a real bummer. I thought I'd weaned myself off of Gladwell, but his fabulism is embedded in my memories from way back :( he's so good at it!
    - syntaxfree 5y ago
      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).
  - jahnu 5y ago
    People really should be very wary of anything Gladwell says in recent years. The fisking The Bomber Mafia got should be evidence enough.
    - jimmySixDOF 5y ago
      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.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  >A Colombian airline crashed in New York after running out of fuel due to similar deference to air traffic control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52
  - smachiz 5y ago
    Not just deference. They crashed without ever declaring an emergency. Ultimately, ATC could have been better - but that was a pilot CRM issue.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      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.
Thaxll 5y ago
Pilots speak their own language in their country, everywhere else is in english. Why Im being downvoted?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- MobileVet 5y ago
  Because English is the official ATC language used world wide. You must know and speak in English to fly. You may speak another language but English is first and relied upon.
  - DocTomoe 5y ago
    Point is, both of you are correct, and this argument is pointless. The native language is a common fallback during emergency situations, in situations where phraseology is insufficient, to expedite communication.
  - physhster 5y ago
    In lots of countries, GA pilots don't speak English, but ATC does.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      Hey be nice, southern accents might be kind of weird, but technically people from Georgia (the state) speak English.
      - mechanical_bear 5y ago
        GA = general aviation
    - 9991 5y ago
  - m2fkxy 5y ago
cft 5y ago
I just visited a traffic control room in Spain and an air traffic controller told me that Spanish and Latin American pilots speak Spanish to them (not only for landing flights, but also for transit flights say from Argentina to Germany while overflying Spain), and the same thing is practiced in France and Italy. So I am not sure you are right about "really not supposed to".
- t0mas88 5y ago
  English is one of the official ICAO languages and it's mandatory for all pilots at least in EASA and FAA rules to be English proficient. But as far as I know it's not forbidden to use any of the other languages if both controller and crew speak that language. Even the other way around, some small French airports have a listing as "French mandatory" for their radio frequencies. Which is quite a challenge for me as a foreign pilot not speaking French. But overall it would be safer if all ATC comms were done in English. Because it's better for situational awareness if you can understand what others in the same airspace are doing.
  - m2fkxy 5y ago
    > it's mandatory for all pilots at least in EASA and FAA rules to be English proficient I would really like to know where you got this from. Been flying in France privately for 7 years, and not a single time have I been requested to speak English nor my aeronautical English skills had to be assessed for me to enjoy flying privileges. Been also flying abroad, in northern Europe, where the local native language very much is the norm, unless a non-native is exchanging with ATC of course.
    - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
      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.
      - m2fkxy 5y ago
chris_va 5y ago
Generally ATC will switch to English when an English speaker comes onto the frequency, but local language is fine otherwise... country dependent, though. I haven't flow in France, but I understand it's mostly in French until someone calls in with English.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  I have flown in France and you are completely right.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  At CDG, wouldn't you assume there's always assume there's an English/non-French speaker on the frequency?
belter 5y ago
"Pursuant to requirements of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), ATC operations are conducted either in the English language or the language used by the station on the ground. In practice, the native language for a region is normally used" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_traffic_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_traffic_control

by JCM9 5y ago

radicaldreamer 5y ago

Korean Air had crash after crash until they forbid crew from speaking in Korean. Turns out cultural norms (highly hierarchical power structure) and honorifics were causing copilots to refrain from pointing out issues or pointing them out in an unclear way. A Colombian airline crashed in New York after running out of fuel due to similar deference to air traffic control.

tapatio 5y ago
"we request priority to land" vs. "we request emergency landing" is what led to the Colombian airlines disaster.
anonu 5y ago
The Colombian airline crash: they were speaking English though. NYC ATC is going to be brusque and quick... The new Yorker way. Not many cultures understand that...
- giraffe_lady 5y ago
  ATC needs to be effective for all cultures that fly into that airport. If the new york one so deviates from the norm that it can cause crashes that is a very serious problem that needs to be addressed. That said I don't have any reason to think it actually does and you didn't supply one either. Are air traffic controllers even normally from the area where they work? Don't they get assigned?
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    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.
    - avar 5y ago
      Two airlines pilots failing to use the specific word "emergency" isn't a single point of failure. They then failed to tell passengers to brace before they crashed, which is thought to have contributed to injuries and even deaths.
      - kayodelycaon 5y ago
        Not precisely, no. When it comes to pilot training or airline-wide problems, that becomes the point of failure. The whole point is creating a defense in depth so one factor can’t take down a plane.
  - secondcoming 5y ago
    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
  - cameldrv 5y ago
    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.
- mattr47 5y ago
  All ATC should be brusque and quick, especially in high traffic environments. The US Army's ATC units had the motto of "Safe, Orderly, & Expeditious."
mbubb 5y ago
some years back I worked on a project with Korean Air on exactly that topic, cockpit communication and honorifics... A compounding factor was that pilots and crew often came from military backgrounds. I learned about a number of air disasters and PanAm/KLM crash[1] in Tenerife 1977 really stuck with me. In the transcript a Dutch pilot says something like "We are now at take off" when he was indicating that the plane was in the process of taking off. (an idiomatic way of expression) There was already much stress on the situation as an incident at another airport caused massive traffic rearrangement across Europe. Under stress we revert to native ways of expression. I tried to keep this incident in the back of my mind throughout the project, and since... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster edit - include the transcrpt: https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/ https://tailstrike.com/database/27-march-1977-klm-4805/
- tomatowurst 5y ago
  What is really maddening about Korean neo-confucian society is this automatic social hierarchy based on your age, as if to suggest someone who is older than you is automatically infallible and has authority over you. It was exported to Japan (Senpai and kōhai is a direct model of Korean sunbae, hoobae) but it doesn't seem to practice Confucianism this strictly, there really is no other countries that take it this extremely. It reminds me of the Japanese invasion of Chosun dynasty, how the rigid military/confucian structure made communication impossible and largely allowed unopposed landings by Hideyoshi's army.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    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.
    - robocat 5y ago
      As a low-ranking middle aged average white guy from a small 1st world country: if I go to Korea can I get a status boost? I have seen low-rank white dudes get status upgrades in other Asian countries for a variety of reasons. One architect told me how he was hanging with high status Indonesians, and how he could name-drop NZ politicians (for example, the minister of finance) because our culture means low-rank citizens can personally know people in high-rank positions. Perhaps I can manipulate the Korean status game in my favour because my background is somewhat unmeasurable.
The5thElephant 5y ago
That was a Malcolm Gladwell theory that has been debunked, particularly here: http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-and-airplane.html http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-... In general I tend to question much of Gladwell's ideas these days seeing how many of them have been demonstrated to be wrong.
- radicaldreamer 5y ago
  Aw man, this is a real bummer. I thought I'd weaned myself off of Gladwell, but his fabulism is embedded in my memories from way back :( he's so good at it!
  - syntaxfree 5y ago
    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).
- jahnu 5y ago
  People really should be very wary of anything Gladwell says in recent years. The fisking The Bomber Mafia got should be evidence enough.
  - jimmySixDOF 5y ago
    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.
sbierwagen 5y ago
>A Colombian airline crashed in New York after running out of fuel due to similar deference to air traffic control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52
- smachiz 5y ago
  Not just deference. They crashed without ever declaring an emergency. Ultimately, ATC could have been better - but that was a pilot CRM issue.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    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.

Thaxll 5y ago

Pilots speak their own language in their country, everywhere else is in english. Why Im being downvoted?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
MobileVet 5y ago
Because English is the official ATC language used world wide. You must know and speak in English to fly. You may speak another language but English is first and relied upon.
- DocTomoe 5y ago
  Point is, both of you are correct, and this argument is pointless. The native language is a common fallback during emergency situations, in situations where phraseology is insufficient, to expedite communication.
- physhster 5y ago
  In lots of countries, GA pilots don't speak English, but ATC does.
  - bee_rider 5y ago
    Hey be nice, southern accents might be kind of weird, but technically people from Georgia (the state) speak English.
    - mechanical_bear 5y ago
      GA = general aviation
  - 9991 5y ago
- m2fkxy 5y ago

cft 5y ago

I just visited a traffic control room in Spain and an air traffic controller told me that Spanish and Latin American pilots speak Spanish to them (not only for landing flights, but also for transit flights say from Argentina to Germany while overflying Spain), and the same thing is practiced in France and Italy. So I am not sure you are right about "really not supposed to".

t0mas88 5y ago
English is one of the official ICAO languages and it's mandatory for all pilots at least in EASA and FAA rules to be English proficient. But as far as I know it's not forbidden to use any of the other languages if both controller and crew speak that language. Even the other way around, some small French airports have a listing as "French mandatory" for their radio frequencies. Which is quite a challenge for me as a foreign pilot not speaking French. But overall it would be safer if all ATC comms were done in English. Because it's better for situational awareness if you can understand what others in the same airspace are doing.
- m2fkxy 5y ago
  > it's mandatory for all pilots at least in EASA and FAA rules to be English proficient I would really like to know where you got this from. Been flying in France privately for 7 years, and not a single time have I been requested to speak English nor my aeronautical English skills had to be assessed for me to enjoy flying privileges. Been also flying abroad, in northern Europe, where the local native language very much is the norm, unless a non-native is exchanging with ATC of course.
  - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    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.
    - m2fkxy 5y ago

chris_va 5y ago

Generally ATC will switch to English when an English speaker comes onto the frequency, but local language is fine otherwise... country dependent, though. I haven't flow in France, but I understand it's mostly in French until someone calls in with English.

GuB-42 5y ago
I have flown in France and you are completely right.
dehrmann 5y ago
At CDG, wouldn't you assume there's always assume there's an English/non-French speaker on the frequency?

belter 5y ago

"Pursuant to requirements of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), ATC operations are conducted either in the English language or the language used by the station on the ground. In practice, the native language for a region is normally used" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_traffic_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_traffic_control