Aviation Radiotelephony Discourse: An Issue of Safety 215The nature of radiotelephony communication might not be clear to the
non-expert community. Consequently, the notion of radiotelephony
discourse analysis can appear to be much more ambiguous than that of any
other special language discourse. On the other hand, study of
radiotelephony communication through discourse analysis enables a
multidimensional approach to this complex phenomenon.
Radiotelephony discourse encompasses the use of spoken (interaction)
and signed (alphanumeric) language and multimodal forms of communication,
and is not restricted to verbal materials; phenomena of interest can range
from silence (pausing) to a single utterance (“OK”) or long dialogues.
Radiotelephony oral discourse has a ‘peripheral status’, compared to non-
verbal job-related actions, that is, according to the flying rule: first –
aviate, second – navigate and third – communicate. In the way understood
in contemporary Critical Discourse Analysis (Bhatia 2010), interpretation
of radiotelephony discourse should have a focus on professional activities
in order to determine its verbal as well as non-verbal components as
potential factors to facilitate or worsen language communication in an
emergency. In particular, such a discourse analysis deals with the
discursive conditions and consequences of verbal (language) and non-
verbal (technical procedures) inequality resulting from the domination of
the latter.
Having localized radiotelephony discourse analysis in the broader
approach to radiotelephony communication, the main aim of this chapter is
to suggest the possible shape of radiotelephony discourse and how it can
be treated for flight safety purposes. One major point in this argument is
that such an analysis should be a contribution not merely to special
discourse studies, but also to applied linguistics (teaching English to pilots
and air traffic controllers to minimize the language-related human factor
risk) and to aviation safety more generally. This means that radiotelephony
discourse analysis should be able to suggest appropriate ways to minimize
language miscommunications and to deal with other issues connected with
the language-related human factor.
Defining radiotelephony discourse
We have pointed out that radiotelephony communication is the use of the
English language in a professional environment, which has a two-fold
nature. On the one hand, a pilot and an air traffic controller (non-verbally)
communicate with technical systems (aircraft and air traffic control
equipment), on the other hand they communicate humanly (verbally) with