Air China Pilot can’t Speak English. Wow!

That’s nucking futs.

@Hotpoter: That’s not the way it works with international aviation. Using that methodology, you’d have to have every pilot learning every language for the countries they fly to. It makes a heck of a lot more sense to have a common language used – which, for better or worse, is English.

It’s important up until they need to communicate to the air traffic controllers. I get what you’re saying, and in another industry, I might agree – but there is a very good reason for having a common language when a number of people’s lives depend on it.

The language situation in air traffic control, as in the UN, Unesco, the EU and other international organizations – where some people are allowed to use their own mother-tongue while others are not, is plainly discriminatory to all the latter group. Native English-speakers now make up something like only 6-8% (and decreasing!) of the world’s population. In other words, the tail is wagging the dog and not vice versa.

English-speaking monolinguals are notorious for having very little understanding of the difficulties of learning and using another language. Too often, one might even call them linguistically arrogant.

I agree of course that English is at present the most wide-spread inter-language, but this is achieved at an enormous cost in time, energy and money, for generation after generation of learners. There will continue to be such problems until we all come to our senses and at least investigate the merits of using a non-ethnic inter-language, as recently advocated by the Swiss prof. Grin: http://lingvo.org/grin/

Back to my original point: the author of this blog brought out the awful English skill of the pilot not because he wants to bring into attention the danger of not speaking “English at the mandatory level”, but to make fun of the pilot because, according to the author, his “brother’s god-awful experience with Air China”. The author’s intent was to mock at and ridicule someone else’s inability because his brother had an unsatisfactory time while traveling.

Mankso: I’ll have you know I spent almost 20 minutes investigating Esperanto! 😛 Like I said, I like the idea, but I think the fever in which supporters of it promote its use as the be-all/end-all solution to “linguistic imperialism” is a bit out of proportion.

And as one who spent no small amount of time teaching English in a foreign country – I’ve seen just how much people are willing to pay for the hopes of increased opportunity that knowing English is said to bring. As well as how difficult it can be to learn.

These are all beside the point of this post though – which is most definitely to mock the pilot’s inability to perform one of the requirements of his job, and further to show how the none-too-small nation of China’s primary airline seems to have no shortage of people in their employ with the same problem.

If the pilot has an issue with people mocking his English, all he need do is fly domestic.

If you manage a busy airport lik New Yorks, there is very little room for multicultural courtesy or other sensitivities towards monolinugal pilots. Any pilot who does not speak English must not be allowed into the worlds skies. That goes also for China. Period.

Incompetence is the rule, not the exception in China, so of course airline pilots from China blend in perfectly.

The Chinese are painfully of system inherent flaws: Chinese space missions are only announced to the public, after their astronauts made it into space alive.

@Mankso: You’re absolutely right about my French 🙁 It’s one of my biggest linguistic regrets (and it’s a short list). Now that I study Chinese (or will officially as of Monday), and have travelled a fair bit more than that Gr. 9 boy that quit to join music instead, I recognize the values in being able to speak a multitude of languages.

I also have witnessed what I think you’re trying to illustrated regarding the air traffic controller. That “foreigner” intolerance. Sort of a “get out of my country if you can’t speak the language” attitude. Hell, I remember having that same attitude when I was younger and even more ignorant than I am now.

And though I do agree that having English as the international language of the century might not be fair, it is the language. We can argue the merits of a better system, but what we can’t argue is that the people in that system that are, for the safety of all involved, required to speak it – should in fact know how to.

Hi,
It’s something like a miracle to see this plane arrived at JFK without any more problems. To my point of view (I’m a french private IFR pilot)I’ve perfectly understood all the ATC groud clearance and was terribly surprised to hear a professional pilot with a so bad read back.

Laurent, you’re tackling it like all English-speaking people got together and said, “Hey… why don’t we make this the world language.” And that’s simply not true.

Now of course there were Anglo-centric policies that swayed this, but it’s for one very simple reason – English speaking countries (US/UK) are, and have been for 200 years, the dominant countries on the planet.

We tend to think of the world in quiet and peaceful terms when discussing “rights” and “should bes” – but that’s simply not now things work, or at least didn’t in the past (and I would argue still largely don’t).

So what’s “fair” and what’s “true” are not the same. Good on the people looking to change this, and all the power to them – however, fair or not, the truth is that English is the most widely spoken language in the world and so when a single language needs to be chosen for consistency and safety (such as air traffic control), it only makes sense that the most spoken language be chosen.

As the great Gord Downie once said “Anything that’s systematic will get you hated…”

truth
truth
truth

we just want the truth. we know asians, east asians, in general, do Not high Verbal skills.

high math skills.
low verbal skills

cannot speak English, known fact of the world. known fact to the world.

Some of you are talking about the cost of making pilots learn English…

So there are no costs incurred teaching the pilots any other languages?

We’ve got to pick one language, and you know we’d be spending a hell of a lot more if pilots required training in several languages or even a different one.

Let’s take a look at how difficult languages are, as well. Chinese, as well as several major languages are tonal. Rising, high, low and falling tones of basically the same sound can all create a different word. Training in this would be awefully hard for most anyone else in the world that isn’t 100% based on tones (we still have it in English, but it isn’t required to be understood, such as when we ask a question with a rising tone on the last word). Another note – over a headset, these tones can be difficult to pick up on, requiring extra listening training.

The written system of chinese (or mandarin, whatever you will pick there) is very difficult. No two characters are alike and by the time you graduate high school you should know how to write 10,000 different words.

Besides English, I only know a few other languages that might be suitable for pilotng besides English. Spanish or Japanese may work, due to their simplicity and use of past/present/future tense structures. I wouldn’t know about any european languages though. Perhaps some one could fill me in. I know French probably wouldn’t work, as I hear even French people walk around with dictionaries in their back pocket to get their tense right on each word.