Aviation Radiotelephony Discourse: An Issue of Safety 221use of a wider vocabulary referring (often with less precision) to domains
and topics outside the aviation area (medicine, military organizations,
etc.), references to complex notions such as hypothesis (we may divert),
indirectness (we would like a request) and, under stressful conditions,
much longer and less organized sentences” (ICAO 2010: 3.3.16).
Though plain English seems to be more ‘human like’ language, it is
supposed to be used in compliance with the requirements of radiotelephony
phraseology. “Plain language in aeronautical radiotelephony communications
means the spontaneous, creative and non-coded use of a given natural
language, although constrained by the functions and topics (aviation and
non-aviation) that are required by aeronautical radiotelephony
communications, as well as by specific safety-critical requirements for
intelligibility, directness, appropriacy, non-ambiguity and concision”
(ICAO 2010: 3.3.14).
Due to the strong focus on safety, all pilots and controllers involved in
international flight operations who do not share a common language must
have stated on their license their level of English language proficiency.
(ICAO doc. 9832, 9835, Annex 10).
Radiotelephony communication is characterized as non-visual (in voice
only), technical (special knowledge with strong focus on safety),
phraseology based, messages simplified but with strict syntactic, lexical,
semantic and phonetic rules (to avoid ambiguity), prescribed and regulated
(both language and actions), switching between phraseology and plain
English (coded and non-coded), licensure required and confirmed
periodically (high stakes of language knowledge).
It is clear that radiotelephony is run with the use of two kinds of English
- aviation phraseology and plain English, and the interaction is highly
restricted by rules and, therefore, is ritualized due to flight safety. Hence, it
can be assumed that the radiotelephony discourse development should be
considered through both linguistic and cognitive perspectives in order to
identify possible backgrounds for radiotelephony miscommunications. It is
important that the radiotelephony verbal discourse is developed with
reflection to non-verbal and kinesthetic signals, which come from
technical equipment at the work place providing visual, sound and tactile
(in aircraft) information instantly processed to maintain appropriateness
between operational solutions and the language used.
In addition to radiotelephony exchanges, while at their work places
outside radiotelephony interaction, pilots and air traffic controllers
communicate with their colleagues in their native language (in
monolingual job settings) or general English (in multilingual job settings).
Regarding the specificity of the English language use to situations in the