‘A Polish flight crew, forced to rely on air traffic control directions after their navigation system shut down, nearly collided with another plane over London Heathrow Airport in 2007 because the flight crew had such poor English skills, according to reports that emerged today. The LOT Polish Airlines (Warsaw) Boeing 737, carrying 89 passengers to Warsaw, wandered around the skies over London for nearly half an hour as the pilots struggled to understand basic instructions. The jetliner’s Flight Management System had apparently failed because the co-pilot entered the wrong geographic coordinates before taking off. Instead of entering an westerly longitude as Heathrow lies to the West of the Prime Meridian Line in the London district of Greenwich, he entered an easterly one. The error meant that the electronic navigational tools that modern pilots use to fly shut down, a report by the Air Accidents Investigations Branch (AAIB) said.
Because of this failure, the pilots were forced to fly the plane manually using standby instruments and struggled to follow the instructions given by air traffic controllers. Several times the co-pilot, who was flying, turned the airplane in the opposite direction given by controllers. At one point he flew the aircraft too close to another flight, forcing the other to change its course. This caused a “Short Term Conflict Alert” but was not close enough to count as a “near miss”, an AAIB spokesman said.
Eventually controllers guided the aircraft step by step back to Heathrow Airport until they could see the runway where they landed, 27 minutes after take off. The June 2007 incident highlights the risk of having so many foreign pilots using British airports who have just a small grasp of English. Only 15 out of 800 Polish pilots flying internationally have passed the test for the required standard of English. English is the international language of aviation but many countries failed to comply with the International Civil Aviation Organisation deadline of March 2008 for ensuring their pilots were proficient in the language.
The AAIB investigation concluded that the initial error by the co-pilot was “compounded by the difficulty of obtaining information from the pilots because of their limited command for English”. The report also notes that all airports around London are very close to the Meridian line and that this “can lead crews to make such co-ordinate entry errors of this nature”. The investigation further concluded that, “An incident like this demonstrates how reliant pilots have become on the Flight Management System.”
By: Bmused55 - 16th June 2008 at 08:03
I recall a British pilot being killed in Paris CDG as a direct result of the Tower not speaking English in the airwaves.
Apparently Air France Pilots refuse(d) to speak English when in Paris CDG and other French airports. They were at one point told to speak English but they threatened to strike so that order was revoked.
One dark evening in CDG, the pilots, ground and tower were twittering away in French when a lone British Shorts 360 was taxiing for take off. Neither of the crew spoke French, so had no situational awareness as they could not listen in to the movements. As a result they did not realise the tower cleared them to cross a runway that a flight was departing on.
An Air Liberte MD80’s wing sliced right through the cockpit of the Shorts 360, killing the co-pilot.
I seem to recal some official body damning French ATC for not instructing traffic in English
By: Short finals - 14th June 2008 at 20:48
Thanks for the offical link SF,
If you’d spent as much time researching your name, you’d have known it’s final… 😀 (Unless we are taking about ‘Finals’ in the military, but then Short Finals wouldn’t really make sense)
🙂
(Oly kidding SF)
NG
Yes, I know all that, but I don’t want to change it now, having used it for several years! :diablo:
By: wawkrk - 14th June 2008 at 17:22
The problem may not only be the pilots English.
But London English.
I was speaking to 2 Polish students a few weeks ago.
Their English was really very good.
They achieved very high grades and had looked forward to their first trip to the UK.They told me they had arrived in London and could hardly wait to get out and about and chat.To their complete shock,they could not understand a word.I told them this is common in the UK.
I listen to many regional accents and sometimes have to listen for several minutes to tune in. Sometimes I cannot understand hardly anything.
I would also add this applies to the USA.
By: steve rowell - 14th June 2008 at 06:39
Quite often whilst listening to my scanner at Melbourne airport.. i’ve heard some of the Garuda pilots.. and especially the Chinese pilots ..who can barely speak English or understand the towers instructions
By: zoot horn rollo - 13th June 2008 at 13:45
The AAIB makes interesting reading acknowledging that the pilots were under great stress trying to fly the aircraft in IMC on standby instruments (as the FMS had effectively shut down) with instructions from ATC which could have been more helpful and thus doesn’t entirely match up with the journalist’s report in the original post above.
In fact, questions could be asked of NATS as regards the support and assistance given by the controller. As regards the number of Polish pilots, this doesn’t appear in the AAIB report and is probably the usual journalistic scaremongering (sorry deatiled fact checking).
The key piece in the report about the language being the following:
Radio telephony communications
International standards
The requirements for language proficiency for operational personnel are detailed in ICAO Annex 1. In 2003, ICAO set a deadline of March 2008 for proficiency in Level 4 (operational) and above English for all pilots flying international routes, and ATC
controllers serving international airports and routes. The proficiency scale ranges from Level 1 to Level 6, with guide lines published for pronunciation, fluency, structure, vocabulary, comprehension and interaction.
ICAO will require that Level 4 pilots are reassessed on their abilities every three years, Level 5 pilots every six years, while at Level 6, no further assessment of a pilot’s English language ability is deemed necessary. Thus, the Level 4 (operational) proficiency is considered as a minimum ‘stepping stone’ to higher levels.
Although the main benefit of high international standards of aviation English is that communications between aircraft and controllers are fully understood, particularly when non-standard words and phrases are used, it also has the benefit of increasing the situational awareness of flight crews in relation to other aircraft, both in the air and on the ground.
For those States not able to comply by March 2008, full implementation is due to be completed by March 2011 .
The Polish Civil Aviation Office (CAA) are due to specify a date by which they will comply with the ICAO requirement for English language proficiency.
It is also interesting to look at the safety actions recommended by the AAIB and note that the subject of the English language doesn’t feature at all.
Safety action
In an event such as this, it is clear that ATC may not be able to rely upon pilots for information about the
aircraft’s status, and their ability to fly the aircraft accurately, with degraded instrumentation. The crew of
Lot 282 were not able to communicate adequately the nature and extent of their problem. Following their own
investigation into this incident, the air traffic service provider has made several recommendations, one of
which is that the circumstances of this event should be used for their internal training purposes. The service
provider is also looking at the possibility of liaising with operators to enable controller training instructors to gain
experience by observing Line Orientated Flight Training (LOFT) training sessions.
The operator is considering reminding its pilots of the necessity to use extra caution when manually entering
latitude and longitude co-ordinates when at locations close to the Prime Meridian. Also, the operator is considering
revising its pilot training to highlight the benefits of declaring an emergency in such circumstances.
Because these actions have already been initiated by the organisations concerned, no Safety Recommendations
are made.
By: B77W - 13th June 2008 at 11:45
Thanks for the offical link SF,
If you’d spent as much time researching your name, you’d have known it’s final… 😀 (Unless we are taking about ‘Finals’ in the military, but then Short Finals wouldn’t really make sense)
🙂
(Oly kidding SF)
By: swerve - 13th June 2008 at 11:30
Yeah. There’s a lot of literature suggesting the biggest linguistic problems arise when English is the internal language, i.e. AT controllers are either native speakers of English (e.g. USA, UK), or there’s a national variety of English (e.g. India). Controllers then sometimes use linguistic shortcuts, or colloquialisms, or national-specific terms. I remember reading a while ago about such a case: a major incident in the USA where ground control gave an instruction in rather casual language which a foreign pilot misunderstood. Controllers for who English is completely foreign are more likely to stick to the standard ATC terminology.
Same thing in business meetings nowadays: Arab & Japanese businessmen, for example, can sometimes converse more readily in English than either can with native English speakers, because they’re using a standardised “International Business English”.
By: frankvw - 13th June 2008 at 10:23
Well, if you did that, not you wouldn’t have many foreign airlines flying in anymore …
And if I had to play devil’s advocate here, I would add that the accent of people in the London area is pretty hard to understand for many non native English speakers…
By: Comet - 13th June 2008 at 10:18
If it is the case that only 15 out of LOT’s 800 pilots speak the necessary level of English, then the airline should be banned from flying international routes until the problem is sorted out.
By: Short finals - 13th June 2008 at 00:54
Personally, I prefer to read the actual official report rather than what I assume is a journalist’s analysis. In this case I would be interested to know whether the phraseology used by ATC was in conformance with standard international “ATC English”, because I suspect that some of the language used might not be easily understood by a non-native speaker of English.
Here is the link to the AAIB report: http://www.aaib.dft.gov.uk/cms_resources/Boeing%20737-500,%20SP-LKA%2006-08.pdf
By: NYRangerfan1994 - 12th June 2008 at 21:30
no one on the flight crew or on the plane was bilingual?
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June 12, 2008 at 9:21 pm