During the pre-solo examination for the flight school, one of the questions was “what are the procedures for arriving and departing at an airport with a control tower?” It took a really long time to find the information to answer that question. Ultimately I found an article on AOPA where somebody actually wrote out the conversation they had with the control tower both when arriving and departing the airport. I got to thinking, there’s actually very little information out there that’s easy to learn from. The AIM has a whole chapter devoted to how to talk to air traffic control, but it doesn’t really lay it out in a way that lets you learn and practice what to say and when.
I think what really needs to be out a kind of collection of scripts that someone can practice with somebody else, kind of like a dialog in a play, so that you can learn how to talk to air traffic control and learn how to talk on the radio. It would probably work best if the other person didn’t necessarily know what their partner was going to say back to the the person practicing. It would work best if there were pictures or diagrams or charts or something that would tell the pilot where they are and what they were doing I a given situation.
Just today, one of the things that I found while thinking about this is was an app called PlaneEnglish. I like the attempt of where they were trying to do with it but the problem is that relies on text to speech recognition from your phone which is buggy at best. I spent an entire intro lesson trying to get the phone to understand me saying the word “cleared” and “fife” and it just couldn’t do it. I don’t know of it’s my voice (I have a pretty deep voice) or if it’s my microphone or my phone case blocking the microphone…I don’t know but it’s very annoying when you have to go through the lesson over and over again. I feel like a Scottsman stuck in a voice recognition elevator. The app seems to try to teach you the correct way to say it but not necessarily what to say. The lessons don’t really tell you how to talk to air traffic control, they just want you to be able to say it clearly.
Again, what I think there really needs to be is a collection of scripts that you can practice situations at various random airports amd locations. with somebody and maybe it’ll throw up maybe throw in some variables of like different airports in different locations. I don’t necessarily know that I’m the kind of person that has the time or the knowledge to create something like this, but I think something like this would really be beneficial to people trying to talk to air traffic control. As I understand it, that is one of the scariest things about being a pilot: public speaking with air traffic control.
FencerPTS 