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Old 9th May 2009, 08:36 AM
Owen H Owen H is offline
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It is certainly an interesting topic, with as usual there will be an emphasis on the Asian airlines, which I believe is somewhat silly. There are plenty of countries in Europe that supposedly speak English, but they still have major communication issues.

I am not suggesting they are perfect, but certainly China is making an effort to improve their English, and although some of the pilot's "conversational" English isn't upto scratch, their "Aviation" English is, in most cases reasonably good.

They can fly over dozens of countries from China to Europe, and through the use of basic aviation language do so successfully.

The countries they have the problems are places like Australia and the US, where there is a widespread use of phrases that are not ICAO, and so the crew do not know them. I have sat on the ground at LAX and listened to a controller get extremely frustrated that the Chinese crew couldn't read back his instructions properly, when none of us on our crew could understand the clearance either! I have also listened to a Sydney controller chastise a Chinese carrier because they elected to stop on the taxiway after being given a confusing taxi clearance. Yes, they did what every pilot is trained to do, and all the controller did was continue to repeat the clearance over and over, when it was clearly confusing the crew. In this instance, and the one in LA, it is clearly the controllers fault... the crew are doing what they are trained to do, and the controller, instead of finding a better, or different, way of explaining their instruction, they just abuse the crew instead.

So whilst I'd say that airlines around the world do need to improve their English skills, the communication issues can be improved on both sides of the microphone.
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