I or We?

sorry I know it may seem sexist, but the tradition is a very old one)

the gender equality folks will be all over you ;)

Timothy wrote:

Let’s face it, any time spent on here suggests a slow day.

Surely it’s ok to share whimsical musings?

Ok, here’s one for you to muse upon…. Why do some people insist on calling finalS?

I mean, you don’t hear people announcing

‘G-ABCD, right downwindS runway 24’, do you? So why ‘G-ABCD finalS runway 24’?

I agree; it is truly odd!

Maybe they are reserving the ability to land on a different runway? 2 runways is more than 1 runway i.e. it is plural and a plural of “final” is “finals”. Hey, that must be the reason!

Or maybe they watch this too many times?

That would also require two aeroplanes Peter.

Peter wrote:

“We” is a bit like saying you are “IFR”… sounds more professional

At some Hungarian airports it’s customary that the AFISO asks while you are taxiing to parking who the pilot in command is the, using the Hungarian expression “parancsnok pilóta”. Its literal transition is “commander pilot” and sounds much more like a title for somebody who commands a squadron of fast jets, not somebody who pilots a 1-ton SEP. I always chuckle when I hear this question. :-)

My aeroplane is a “he”.

Aeroplanes are already tempramental, to be also female would be an impossible situation to manage :-)

Seems like a thing of the Brits to personalize things:

https://www.avweb.com/avwebflash/shortfinal/Short-Final-228866-1.html

He could just have said ‘unable’.

Horrible sexist stuff about the boats @Fuji_Abound, so as a punishment I suggest that for the next flights you start doing it the correct way:
“My wife and I request descent to FL80 and would like to take G-xxxx with us”

I don’t know whether any of you read these ‘short finalS’ on avweb, they can be quite funny. There is an archive.

Fuji_Abound wrote:

I always wonder about referring to my aircraft as “she” rather than “it” or anything else. Sailing boats are always “she”.

In German you can say: " Mein Flieger ist eine Cessna " making it a male and a female object in one single sentence I am just so glad I only have to teach people how to fly and not how to speak German…

NB: One can even make it more confusing (but still grammatically correct!) by saying: " Mein Flugzeug ist eine Baron ". Neutral, female and male gender in a five-word sentece referring to one single object…

In my short flying career I alternated between “I” and “We” depending on whether I was solo or dual, but also sometimes randomly. In German you cannot say “have the traffic in sight” without saying whether “have” is plural or singular. You can either say “habe den Verkehr in Sicht”, implying "I, or “haben den Verkehr in Sicht” thus implying “we”.
Of course “Verkehr in Sicht” = “traffic in sight” avoids this the same way as in English.