Priya Raghunathan

Tutor. An ICAO language-proficiency examiner who still flies the line, which is why the sim session drills sound like the real thing rather than like a textbook.

A staff portrait, toned in the site's gold and bronze. A younger woman with dark hair tied back, in a white collared shirt with her arms folded, smiling at the camera against a warm wall crossed by a soft band of window light.
Role
Tutor
Affiliation
Slop University School of Language and Safety
Email
priya.raghunathan@slop.university
Contact
Sim sessions first. Rostered away in weeks 3 and 9 — those sessions are covered, and email will be slow in those weeks rather than unanswered.

Current first officer, and a rated ICAO language-proficiency examiner: one of the people who sits across a desk and decides whether a pilot’s English is good enough to be allowed on a frequency.

Runs the sim sessions and writes the drills. The drills are built from real transmissions rather than invented ones, which is why they contain the hesitations, the stepped-on calls and the mid-phrase corrections that a textbook example never has.

What to ask about

The examiner’s side of week 8: what Level 4 actually requires, what it feels like to assess it, and the uncomfortable fact that a rating scale for human language has consequences for people’s careers.

Also the thing students ask most: how much of this matters once you are actually flying. The honest answer is that most of it is invisible until the day it isn’t, and that the drills are for that day.

On being assessed by a practitioner

Marking your drills is not the same as flying with you, and it would be easy to blur those. The marking criteria on each assessment page are the ones that apply — not “would I want this person on my frequency”, which is a judgement this course has no business making about a first-year student.