The importance of English language in Aviation

[ticketas]

Hello,

My name is Mykolas. I live in Lithuania and currently I am studying for my pilots license and Aerospace engineering masters degree VGTU (Vilnius Gediminas Technical University).

My final paper is about an importance of English language in aviation. So I would like to ask for help:

1. Information about techniques of evaluating English knowledge (especially for evaluating professional requirements).
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2. Any article about incidents because of miscommunication or recordings would help.

3. Expert opinion on the subject would really help.

4. Information on where I could find statistics about the traffic in airports would help.

5. Any ideas to make the subject more useful or interesting would also be very appreciated.



I will mention and give credit to anyone who will help me on my Master's dissertation.

 

[teechar]

For academic references you could do a search on Google Scholar:

http://scholar.google.com/

;-)

 

[probus]

There is nothing academic about it. It is not a matter of scholarship, but of universally accepted international cooperation. When Air France is right behind Aeroflot on approach to landing into Tokyo, for example, what language do you suppose they are using to talk to Air Traffic Control? English. It is the international language of aviation.

 

[probus]

Hello,

2. Any article about incidents because of miscommunication or recordings would help.

I will mention and give credit to anyone who will help me on my Master's dissertation.

Perhaps the most famous aviation acccident involving communication failure is the crash of a Colombian Avianca flight in the New York City area. The aircraft simply ran out of fuel. You can read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avianca_Flight_52

New York is an extremely busy air traffic control area, and New Yorkers are famously aggressive and combative (not saying they really are, just saying they are famous for it.) Apparently the flight crew of the Avianca flight were too polite to point out to Air Traffic Control that they might well run out of fuel if they did not receive priority handling.