Flying into French Language Only (FR-only) airfields (and French ATC ELP)

Mooney_Driver wrote:

They are usually of a fair quality from the ones I have heard (my wife teaches those courses and has ample examples). Using deliberatly bad quality samples should qualify as malpractice.

Regardless of rules and regulations.. France is such a wonderfully aviation friendly country with so many well placed airfields that it is definitely worth learning enough of the language to safely use FR Seulement airfields!

in that case it’s part of the idea

I haven’t done this exam so can’t say from experience, but you could make it really unfair e.g. by presenting English with a heavy accent – whose speaker would be very unlikely to get any level of ELP himself!

And some European accents make English really hard to understand. Different people struggle with different ones. And it is always the case that a native of country X will find it much easier to understand English which is heavily accented in X than a native of another country; this is why we get people here on EuroGA who are from X saying that some radio transmission (heard on a flying video) is perfectly legible, when the non-X pilot who posted the video cannot understand it. That probably also relates to the paragraph above; if the examining authority chooses one of their own to do the English samples, the result could be perfectly legible to them but illegible to someone used to “Queen’s English”.

Doesn’t ELP6 require some level of correct English pronounciation? You don’t really need that for flying but it would be wrong to call something “6” when it is illegible to an English native who went to a school Large portions of the UK speak virtually unintelligible English, to the extent that it has to be subtitled (or, in modern BBC political correctness, edited right out because subtitles make the people look stupid) from news broadcasts, but those people don’t bother to get into the PPL scene.

France is such a wonderfully aviation friendly country with so many well placed airfields that it is definitely worth learning enough of the language to safely use FR Seulement airfields!

I think very few would disagree with the idea that France should be allowed to have FR-only airfields*. The alternative is to require all French pilots to learn English (for safety) which would wipe out the GA scene there in the same way as learning French would wipe out the GA scene in the UK. OTOH that line of argument is inconsistent with the use of French in the international aviation scene in France (which is not only mandatory per French law, but is also common practice even by crews which can definitely speak English) where it does greatly reduce safety…

* It’s ok for me to say this because I cannot fly to any FR-only airfields anyway, out of the UK, because there is a virtually total overlap between FR-only and those which have immigration

I also think that for all the controversy about ELP in GA, the whole topic seems to have been totally swept under the carpet within ATC. You will don’t have to travel very far south from the UK to get illegible ATC and illegible ATIS.

And some European accents make English really hard to understand.

Some will say that the British accent makes English really hard to understand…

The alternative is to require all French pilots to learn English (for safety)

I would argue that foreign traffic (and traffic in general) at those fields is so low that the fact that a few now and then speak English is not a safety issue. In my view it requires some tolerance from the part of French pilots who should refrain from telling others that 123,5 is FR-only

Aviathor wrote:

Some will say that the British accent makes English really hard to understand…

If there was such a thing as a British accent it would make life much simpler! There are a myriad of accents and patois within the British Isles.

@Bordeaux_Jim:
I don‘t know if this works reliably with all German authorities. I will have to move my license from the Regierungspräsidium to the Luftfahrtbundesamt when I get the IR. Then I will report how they handle the language entries…

Peter wrote:

I haven’t done this exam so can’t say from experience, but you could make it really unfair e.g. by presenting English with a heavy accent – whose speaker would be very unlikely to get any level of ELP himself!

Doesn’t ELP6 require some level of correct English pronounciation?

It certainly does. The “ICAO Language Proficiency Rating Scale” from ICAO Annex I states:

Pronunciation, stress, rhythm, and intonation, though possibly influenced by the first language or regional variation, almost never interfere with ease of understanding.

I find that quote astonishing, but it depends on the definition of the first four words.

Possibly why native English speakers are apparently harder to understand….they are unlikely to use the required pronunciations like Tree, Fower and Fife…and daysimal.