Week 7: 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

19 April 2027

Everybody departs from the standard. Controllers do it, pilots do it, and the frequency keeps working. That is the problem.

Where it comes from#

Not laziness. Four real pressures:

• Rate. Standard phraseology is longer. On a saturated frequency, seconds are the scarce resource and clipping is what you do with them.
• Familiarity. Regulars on a sector build a shared shorthand, which is genuinely efficient among people who share it.
• Register. Standard phraseology is cold. “With you” and “have a good one” are people being people on a channel that gives them nothing else.
• Fatigue. At the end of a night shift the standard form is the one that takes effort.

Notice that three of the four are things you would not want to remove from a human being.

Why the cost is invisible#

Here is the argument this lecture actually turns on.

When a non-standard exchange succeeds — and it almost always succeeds — every participant gets direct evidence that it was fine. When a standard exchange succeeds, they get the same evidence. The two are indistinguishable from inside.

The cost only appears in the tail: the exchange where the shared context was not shared, where the listener was new, tired, or a non-native speaker, or where the shorthand collided with a real phrase. So the people with the most experience of non-standard phraseology working are, structurally, the people with the least evidence of it failing.

That is an argument about evidence, not about discipline, and it is the strongest form of the case. Take it seriously before you accept it — it also happens to be unfalsifiable in the everyday, which is a warning sign about any argument.

The catalogue#

BAW123   Center, Speedbird one two three with you, flight level three five zero.
ACC      Speedbird one two three, roger, any traffic please advise.

WITH YOU is not a check-in. ROGER is being used where readback or AFFIRM belongs. ANY TRAFFIC PLEASE ADVISE is actively discouraged — it invites simultaneous transmissions from every station on frequency, which is week 1’s failure mode requested on purpose.

BAW123   Roger that, affirmative, we'll take the visual. Over and out.

ROGER THAT is padding. AFFIRMATIVE was shortened to AFFIRM precisely because a clipped affirmative has been heard as its own opposite. OVER AND OUT is a contradiction: OVER hands the frequency back, OUT ends the exchange. You cannot do both, and the phrase survives only from film.

Avianca 052, 25 January 1990#

A Boeing 707 from Bogotá, held three times in poor weather for about an hour and seventeen minutes, ran out of fuel and crashed at Cove Neck, New York. 73 of 158 people on board died.

The crew told ATC they could not hold longer, that they were “running out of fuel”, and that they could not reach their alternate. What they did not transmit was the phrase that would have moved them to the front of the queue. MINIMUM FUEL is an advisory. A declaration of MAYDAY or a fuel emergency compels action. The distinction is real, it is in the phraseology, and it was not used.

The NTSB found the probable cause to be the crew’s failure to manage the fuel load and their failure to communicate an emergency fuel situation to ATC, and recommended standardised terminology for emergency fuel communications.

Read the dissent, too. Board Member Burnett voted against adopting the report because he thought it inadequately addressed ATC’s role. This course’s interest is narrower and sharper than either position: the crew said true things in a form that did not carry their urgency. They were not misunderstood. They were understood exactly as they spoke, and how they spoke understated the situation.

Which is week 8, from the other side: what happens when a speaker’s command of a language is good enough for routine work and not good enough for the phrase that saves them.

The disagreement#

Halvard is co-teaching this lecture because he does not fully accept it.

His position, which will be argued live rather than paraphrased here: some departures from the standard carry information that the standard cannot — tone that tells you a controller is saturated, a shorthand that tells you the person on the other end knows the sector. Removing them would remove a channel that experienced operators actually use.

Noor’s reply is that this is precisely the invisibility argument restated by somebody with a lot of successful exchanges behind them.

Neither of them is going to win in front of you. Decide what you think, and be ready to defend it in the transcript analysis — where the temptation is to diagnose everything unusual as a defect, and the marking rewards knowing the difference.