Transmission of Distress and Urgency Calls – Aeronautical English in Use

With ongoing challenges to the accuracy of aeronautical communications, distress and urgency calls need to be brought into sharper focus. They are the only possible ways pilots can obtain assistance in non-routine and emergency situations. Radiotelephony communication is not an after-the-fact activity: “You need to know what you’re going to say before an event occurs” (Tavlin, 2019). Otherwise a minor event can be turned into a major disaster. Since research on aeronautical discourse is a relatively new research area, we face a significant gap here. The presentation aims to explore the current status of distress and urgency calls and check whether their recommended structure works well in an emergency context. In order to understand these types of messages, it is mandatory to be familiarised not only with the aeronautical context, but especially with the mechanism of radiotelephony communication as well as the linguistic code supported by plain (general) English. Moreover, the emphasis should be particularly on saying the correct message at the proper time, so that no one involved is confused. The radiotelephony language variety also has to be learned by operational personnel who are native speakers of English because its specific coded nature may impede comprehension by general users of the aviation community. The debate about whether the use of distress and urgency calls by native speakers of English and non-native speakers is similar or different will follow.