Foreign accents on the radio

RalphInCA

RalphInCA

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RalphInCA
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Sitting here on my back deck, listening to the chatter on the local small airport CTAF.

Lots of very hard to understand transmissions due to accents. Mostly Asian. Many of these transmissions tend to be way longer than they need to be — using up valuable airtime on a busy frequency.

Many of the transmissions are simply useless due to unintelligibility.

When is the FAA going to do something about this?
 
RalphInCA said:
When is the FAA going to do something about this?
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Like what? What’s the benchmark? How would you keep it objective? I do think my Midwest “accent” should be the standard since there is no accent like the rest of you living in other parts of the US.
 
WTF?

I hear just as many good old boys trying to coordinate a fishing trip with their thick Texas accent on ctaf.

Everybody should strive to be a succinct as possible. I would also guess that a lot of the Asian pilots you're hearing are probably students.

How were your radio calls when you were a student?

But seriously WTF?
 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
Like what? What’s the benchmark? How would you keep it objective? I do think my Midwest “accent” should be the standard since there is no accent like the rest of you living in other part of the US.
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I think the standard should be Minnesotan accent and everybody should be required to adopt it so even when people bicker they would sound cute.
 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
Cajun is my fav, followed by whatever accent NASCAR’s Ward Burton has/had.
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Dude we used to have a guy in our Tower who sounded exactly like a combination of boomhauer from King of the Hill and that Cajun dude from The waterboy. I wish I had thought to pull some recordings of him talking but every time he would give us instructions I would laugh so hard.
 
My pet peave are those...on a non-towered airport with a single 2,500-foot runway...who feel that the world needs to know they are taxiing to the fuel pumps, or to hangar row G, or whatnot. Look out the darn window, for heck's sake, and coordinate with other aircraft if necessary.

I suspect this is a holdover from operating from towered airports.

Ron Wanttaja
 
Another vote to adopt the Midwestern dialect as the radio standard. Along with promoting these popular Midwestern phrases into universally taught and accepted radio phraseology:

"Yeah, no" = negative / unable to comply
"No, yeah" = affirmative

That should make radio comms more seamless for us.
 
I knew one C152 pilot that was pretty good at impressions and would answer every radio call with a different accent. After a while, ATC would ask "say number souls aboard".
 
RalphInCA said:
Sitting here on my back deck, listening to the chatter on the local small airport CTAF.

Lots of very hard to understand transmissions due to accents. Mostly Asian. Many of these transmissions tend to be way longer than they need to be — using up valuable airtime on a busy frequency.

Many of the transmissions are simply useless due to unintelligibility.

When is the FAA going to do something about this?
Click to expand...
Never
 
Flew into a class D airport in Alabama. The guy in the tower had the thickest southern accent i’ve heard. I like everything southern, including the accent, i myself live in Texas, but holy crap i couldn’t understand a word he was saying. would the faa have to do something about him as well?
 
Try to put yourself in their shoes. What if you went to China for flight training and had to make all your radio calls in… Chinese (I realize English is standard, but just for arguments sake).

I do try to be patient with these guys for this reason. It has to be hard for them.
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I hear just as many more good old boys trying to coordinate a fishing trip with their thick Texas accent on ctaf.
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FTFY.

This kind of activity is not confined to Texas.

At least it never happens on guard. Oh, wait...
 
I say! If these blighters are not saying "tally ho" and "jolly good" on the radios in their best upper-class English RAF voice, well that's not quite cricket!

And yes, they're hard to understand sometimes, but I still prefer it to the good ol' boy network having a "hey, what's going on, man?!" chit-chat on busy CTAF frequencies.
 
Oh goody. We don’t have enough excuses to engage in the time-honored tradition of finding excuses to dislike anyone different than ourselves. Thanks for the addition.

Maybe that wasn’t the intent. But
RalphInCA said:
When is the FAA going to do something about this?
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sure makes it sound like it.
 
I think I will start using Decimal instead of Point.
Get back to my British heritage.
 
RalphInCA said:
Sitting here on my back deck, listening to the chatter on the local small airport CTAF.

Lots of very hard to understand transmissions due to accents. Mostly Asian. Many of these transmissions tend to be way longer than they need to be — using up valuable airtime on a busy frequency.

Many of the transmissions are simply useless due to unintelligibility.

When is the FAA going to do something about this?
Click to expand...
The standard is speak, read, write and understand English. Maybe the issue is you don’t understand English when spoken with an accent you are not accustomed. When is the FAA toning to do something about that?
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
WTF?

I hear just as many good old boys trying to coordinate a fishing trip with their thick Texas accent on ctaf.

Everybody should strive to be a succinct as possible. I would also guess that a lot of the Asian pilots you're hearing are probably students.

How were your radio calls when you were a student?

But seriously WTF?
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If you listened to any freq in the Phoenix area, you'd understand his comment.

It's bad....I mean really bad. And one of the reasons PHX TRACON has had such an adversarial relationship with GA.

Unfortunately that adversarial approach is how the FAA deals with it. Only way it is going to change is when the flight schools prioritize quality of training over raking in the cash.
 
Fearless Tower said:
Flight schools could hire Samuel L Jackson to do their English proficiency checks?
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iu
 
RalphInCA said:
Sitting here on my back deck, listening to the chatter on the local small airport CTAF.

Lots of very hard to understand transmissions due to accents. Mostly Asian. Many of these transmissions tend to be way longer than they need to be — using up valuable airtime on a busy frequency.

Many of the transmissions are simply useless due to unintelligibility.

When is the FAA going to do something about this?
Click to expand...
They’ve done quite a bit already. Have you read the advisory circular on English language standards?

 
455 Bravo Uniform said:
my Midwest “accent” should be the standard since there is no accent like the rest of you living in other parts of the US.
Click to expand...
MauleSkinner said:
Minnesotan isn’t an accent…it’s the only place in the world WITHOUT an accent, don’cha know.
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When I was a kid living in Iowa i remember thinking the same.... midwest is pure with no accent
then we moved away, and sometime later I heard a Chicagoan speak. Have you ever heard someone from the midwest speak? :cool:
ArrowFlyer86 said:
"No, yeah" = affirmative
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aka you-betcha
 
wanttaja said:
My pet peave are those...on a non-towered airport with a single 2,500-foot runway...who feel that the world needs to know they are taxiing to the fuel pumps, or to hangar row G, or whatnot. Look out the darn window, for heck's sake, and coordinate with other aircraft if necessary.

I suspect this is a holdover from operating from towered airports.

Ron Wanttaja
Click to expand...
I was just going to write that. I’m at a busy training field with 2 schools & one runway, yet they yammer on about their taxiing intentions. I blame their instructors who mostly came out big name pilot mills who are headed to the “bigs.”

2nd place goes to IFR training flights announcing on the radio to a full vfr pattern that they’re at the IFR fix dodad & their intended route is on the “RNAV to what ever,” as if that information had any meaning to the rest of us. “15 miles south of the airport at 2000 inbound,” is all we need.

In defense of the OPs complaint. Some have pretty poor English skills. I’m sure they are foreign students training to go back home to fly airlines. That speaks to the quality of aviation education we offer that everyone wants to train here.

Up in Canada you’re just as likely to hear French as English from both pilots & controllers, particularly in the East. I think this makes situational awareness a little tough for English only pilots, but at least we didn’t have to learn French to fly in their airspace.
 
dans2992 said:
Try to put yourself in their shoes. What if you went to China for flight training and had to make all your radio calls in… Chinese (I realize English is standard, but just for arguments sake).
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Is that true? I would expect flight training in China to be in Chinese.

English is only a requirement for international operations. If you're a Chinese national flying only domestically in China, I don't think the ICAO rules say you have to speak a word of English to get a pilot license. Maybe China has something that's more strict.
 
Recently was suffering to decode a student landing at my home port. About all I could decipher was that he was flying a “chair-da-key” …
 
rwellner98 said:
Is that true? I would expect flight training in China to be in Chinese.

English is only a requirement for international operations. If you're a Chinese national flying only domestically in China, I don't think the ICAO rules say you have to speak a word of English to get a pilot license. Maybe China has something that's more strict.
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Under ICAO there is "English Proficiency" and the various member states have different ways to test and certify for it. I hold an "English Proficiency Level 5" certificate which is a native born speaker.

In China airline pilots hold mostly level 4 and level 5 proficiency. Remember, it's not who takes the test but rather who gives the test. ;)
 
Doc Holliday said:
Remember, it's not who takes the test but rather who gives the test. ;)
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Plus, when they take the test that’s all they’re doing…they’re not operating an aircraft at the same time.

Apparently “follow the Hawker” can mean a couple of things, only one of which is to follow the Hawker. ;)

And apparently “the checkride will now begin” isn’t an indicator that one is taking a checkride. :eek:
 
Doc Holliday said:
Under ICAO there is "English Proficiency" and the various member states have different ways to test and certify for it. I hold an "English Proficiency Level 5" certificate which is a native born speaker.

In China airline pilots hold mostly level 4 and level 5 proficiency. Remember, it's not who takes the test but rather who gives the test. ;)
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Doesn't that requirement only apply to international operations? From ICAO Annex 1.

"""
The provisions of 1.2.9 refer to Annex 10, Volume II, Chapter 5, whereby the language used for radiotelephony communications may be the language normally used by the station on the ground or English. In practice, therefore, there will be situations whereby flight crew members will only need to speak the language normally used by the station on the ground.
"""

Doesn't that translate to "if you're in China, you can speak Chinese or English" or "if you're in Mexico, you can speak Spanish or English"?

I mean, I can tell you first hand from spending over a decade in Mexico that even international airports there speak a whole lot of Spanish and my understanding is that is totally compliant ICAO standards. Even during the one weekend I spent flying in Germany, a nation famous for both for rule following and English education, I heard plenty of German from ATC.
 
rwellner98 said:
Doesn't that requirement only apply to international operations? From ICAO Annex 1.

"""
The provisions of 1.2.9 refer to Annex 10, Volume II, Chapter 5, whereby the language used for radiotelephony communications may be the language normally used by the station on the ground or English. In practice, therefore, there will be situations whereby flight crew members will only need to speak the language normally used by the station on the ground.
"""

Doesn't that translate to "if you're in China, you can speak Chinese or English" or "if you're in Mexico, you can speak Spanish or English"?

I mean, I can tell you first hand from spending over a decade in Mexico that even international airports there speak a whole lot of Spanish and my understanding is that is totally compliant ICAO standards.
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Yes, international operations.

But the point is when it comes to english, they (China) make the rules. Most Chinese airline pilots know certain phrases. Throw in something out of the ordinary and watch the confusion begin. But those guys have English Level Proficiency cards which means they speak and understand the english language.

A couple of decades ago, late one night over Wyoming in the flight levels:

Center: "China Cargo 115 I have a new routing, let me know when ready to copy"
CC115: "Raja, Ready"
Center: "China Cargo 115 now cleared J82 Crazy Woman J82 Rapid City then as filed"
CC115: long hesitation........
Center: "Did you copy China Cargo 115?"
CC115: "Uh, raja, China Cargo 115........J82...."Cwazy Woman??"
Center: "Yes, J82 Crazy Woman J82 Rapid City then as filed"
CC115: "Cwazy Woman????"
Center: "China Cargo 115, yes, identifier Charlie Zulu India, copy?"
CC115: "Cwazy Woman???"
 
SixPapaCharlie said:
I hear just as many good old boys trying to coordinate a fishing trip with their thick Texas accent on ctaf.
Click to expand...
My friend's Texas accent, combined with his incredibly slow delivery can make radio calls interesting. I was flying with him once when a controller told him, "Ok cowboy, gonna need to speed up your calls just a little bit!" He laughed and let me take over the radio.
 
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