What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Twelve lectures, one an argument. They run in an order that matters: the doctrine of the reserved word in week 4 comes before the accident that produced it in week 5, so that the accident arrives as evidence rather than as a moral.
Each week names a different class of failure. Mishearing is only the first one, and by week 6 the digits are arriving correctly and the sentence type is not. Two weeks are a matched pair — week 9 establishes a safety property nobody designed, and week 10 is about the technology that removes it.
Where a lecture makes a claim about an accident, it cites the official report.
That is enforced rather than intended: spec/phraseology.test.ts fails the
suite if a page names an incident without a citation on an investigator’s
host.
- Week1
Why aviation invented its own English
What is wrong with ordinary language for this job, and what a deliberately impoverished replacement buys you
- Week2
Alfa to Zulu: the spelling alphabet as an engineering artefact
Twenty-six words chosen by experiment, two of them deliberately misspelled, and the numbers that had to be redesigned too
- Week3
Readback, hearback, and the loop
Readback is the half everybody teaches. Hearback is the half that fails, and it fails under a workload a transcript cannot show you
- Week4
The word "takeoff"
One word, reserved to one context, everywhere else replaced by "departure" — and why we do the rule this week and the accident next week
- Week5
Tenerife, 1977
583 people, one runway, and a sequence in which the phraseology failed at four separate points — read as evidence, not as a story
- Week6
Numbers, levels, and the QNH
Where the problem stops being phonetic and becomes arithmetic — a level read back correctly and understood as something else
- Week7
Non-standard phraseology and what it costs
The harm is invisible from inside a successful exchange, which is why it is so hard to argue about — and why one of your teachers disagrees
- Week8
ICAO Level 4 as regulation
A rating scale for human language, with careers attached to it, and the plain-language fallback for when phraseology runs out
- Week9
Accent, fatigue, and the party line
Intelligibility is a property of the channel, not of the speaker — and the shared frequency is a safety device nobody designed
- Week10
CPDLC: text replaces voice
Datalink solves mishearing completely, and removes four things nobody was counting — the strongest test of whether you have the course's argument
- Week11
Transcribe and diagnose
The method, stated plainly: how to transcribe honestly, and how to write a finding somebody who disagrees with you can check
- Week12
What a designed language cannot fix
The closing argument, and the empty row from week 5 — there is still no phrase for "I think this clearance is wrong"