What is your view of when, whether or if it is ever appropriate?
Sometimes very appropriate and often initiated by ATC. However, it’s important to clearly separate it from phraseology.
Us in non English speaking countries have a great advantage there — we switch to our national language and it is clear what is conversational and what is an ATC instruction. This technique is frequently practised in Germany by GA and by airlines — official stuff in English, conversational/explanatory in German.
I find it very useful to explain my rationale or give them additional input. A frequent example is when returning IFR to my home field and passing the extremely busy Munich TMA, ATC like to give instructions like “descent altitude 6000ft at 1000fpm or greater”. I will repeat the instruction and then switch to German and tell them “I can do that but it hurts my ears so if there is another convenient solution, I’d be grateful”. The other way as well: they give me an inconvenient instruction, switch to German and explain why.
With ATC I guess not, but with FIS, on a slow day?
During the volcanic ash scare, to be honest, the ATCOs and FISOs sounded so lonely that I was quite worried about them.
But even on busy frequencies like London Information I’ve heard safety-critical exchanges like an Ryanair FO asking for results of the Grand National and Air France captains who can’t be bothered with VolMet.
Conversational exchange doesn’t imply off-topic, does it?
In my experience it is always the Ryanair crews who can’t be bothered with VOLMET
I should have said with ATC, FIS, A/G in fact generally anything over the airways, and also worth discussing anything aircraft to aircraft.
achimha wrote:
Us in non English speaking countries have a great advantage there — we switch to our national language and it is clear what is conversational and what is an ATC instruction. This technique is frequently practised in Germany by GA and by airlines — official stuff in English, conversational/explanatory in German.
Seems to be a very nice way to consider things. I wasn’t aware of this. May take out some worry too not to be sufficiently proficient in any situation. This could encourage pilots to communicate more often in English in their country (in France, for instance) if one knows he always can revert back to his national language as a “backup” solution. Because often it is the informal part (not phraseology) which may be less mastered.
A while ago in France, the controller asked me to call him on another frequency. Wondering what on earth we’d done, or what was going on (the frequency wasn’t listed on SkyDemon), we called up.
We then proceeded to have a nice chat for about 10 minutes about my aircraft!
There is really two aspects to this, no?
One is switching from phraseology to normal speech to discuss issues relevant to the flight. The other is adding “conversational stuff” (jokes, greetings etc.). I think the former should be used as required and useful (as Achim pointed out above) – the latter could be done as “appropriate” – i.e. on a non-busy frequency I’d say it’s ok to exchange a few words, on a busy frequency it’s not, though it’s still ok IMHO to add a “thank you” or “good-bye”, which is obviously conversational, too, but short.
When flying locally, I often hear other pilots i know on FIS (such as, recently, @europaxs) and I usually feel the urge to say “hello” to them, but I’ve never done it, wouldn’t consider it appropriate.
The way I was taught is that if you want to speak to another aircraft you just ask FIS/ATC ‘request permission to pass a message to aircraft xxx’ and the couple of times I did that, it was always granted. Of course you don’t do that on a busy frequency.
