Blog
As we slowly emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic and the aviation industry gears up for restart, this article examines one small but important safety concern - the issue of loss of language proficiency. We briefly explore the concept of ‘language attrition’ before examining some recent guidance on industry restart, and conclude with some advice for pilots, controllers and training managers returning to active duty.
Radio communication between pilots and controllers features standard phraseology in the first instance and plain English when phraseology does not suffice. The two go together, hand-in-hand: safe and efficient radiotelephony relies on both. In this blog, we explain why it is so important for ICAO English tests to directly address radiotelephony communication, and we explore some of the reasons why radiotelephony is conspicuously absent in much aviation language testing today.
