Speaking about runway incursions…. You can hear the voice of the controller shaking:
I am often asked why we need a radio test, this is a very good example of WHY. The pilot was not cleared to enter the runway nor to take off. The controller’s phraseology was poor and his monitoring of the situation was even worse.
Tumbleweed wrote:
The controller’s phraseology was poor and his monitoring of the situation was even worse.
Monday morning quarterback. I think she did good. Not everyone is a native English speaker, and soon we will all have to learn Chinese anyway.
China actually just announced that from 2017 on, Mandarin will no longer be allowed in Chinese airspace, and everyone will have to use English.
And what will be the cost of an ELP level 6 certificate? Less than in Italy, I can’t help suspecting.
Rwy20 wrote:
China actually just announced that from 2017 on, Mandarin will no longer be allowed in Chinese airspace, and everyone will have to use English.
Interesting.
While flying in the Paris class A yesterday I heard an Air China pilot who seemed to speak very good English as opposed to the common conception.
What I don’t get is that if you have even a small business, anywhere in the world, you can usually find somebody to work there who speaks good English.
For example any company in China that has not recruited somebody who was West-educated is practically dead.
If you open a cafe in Spain, France, Italy, Greece, whatever, and there is a significant English speaking tourist presence, you will recruit sombody who speaks good English.
But for some reason the ATC business, where speaking English could not be a more blindingly obvious safety issue, is resistant to this proposition.
Not picking up bad readbacks needs a better ELP than speaking standard phrases, but this better ELP is what is needed.
Not the first time it has been stated: running a service, such as ATC, is not a business. It is a public service.
If all of them were businesses, they’d have to be profitable, making them way too expensive for most of us.
Peter wrote:
Not picking up bad readbacks needs a better ELP than speaking standard phrases, but this better ELP is what is needed.
If you are referring to the German runway incursion, how can you be sure that the controller would indeed have picked up on the incorrect read-back had it been in German? He may not.
running a service, such as ATC, is not a business. It is a public service.
Not sure how far your tongue is in your cheek there 
That would seem to be an excuse for e.g. a hospital to just kill everybody who gets admitted.
how can you be sure that the controller would indeed have picked up on the incorrect read-back had it been in German? He may not.
True, but in your native language you can pick up 10x more stuff, relative to having just remembered standard phrases. I have myself done lots of wrong readbacks (mainly, I would claim, due to poor quality transmissions by the other person) and they get picked up with zero tolerance by the UK ATC, much less by say German ATC (whose transmitted English is normally great), and usually not at all by most of the others further south.
Within any country, the number of people in key ATC positions is miniscule compared with the number working in tourist cafes, etc.
Most people on EuroGA are not native UK, but most of those who I have met personally speak vastly better English than ATC do in their respective countries.
You do need very good people in ATC, and not just because the radio quality is often so bad that they need every help they can get.
