Week 2 Sim Session: Alphabet and numbers, under noise

Drills at the edge of intelligibility, because the alphabet you know in a quiet room is not the one you will need

3 March 2027

The alphabet is easy in a quiet room, which is why we do not practise it in one.

Before you arrive#

Learn the twenty-six words and the ten digits. This is the only rote learning the course asks of you, and the session assumes it is done — we are not spending the hour teaching you that S is SIERRA.

In the session#

Ladder drill, clean channel. Callsigns at increasing speed until you fumble. We record where each person breaks. Nobody breaks in the same place, which is the point of doing it individually rather than as a class chant.

Ladder drill, degraded channel. The same, with pink noise mixed into the headset at three increasing levels. Your personal confusion pairs will show up here, and they are usually not the ones you predicted. Write down what you actually mis-heard, not what you expected to.

Number blocks. Levels, headings, squawks, frequencies. Digit-by-digit, and then deliberately wrongly as a group — twenty-seven left — so you can hear how much faster the correct form is to parse even though it has more syllables in it.

Copy under load. Full clearances, noise up, while doing something else with your hands. This is the closest the session gets to the real thing.

The counter-example we do on purpose#

Late in the session Halvard will transmit this. It is wrong in two ways, and you are asked to name both before we discuss it:

TWR      Cessna GBAME, taxi to holding point A2, okay?
GBAME    Okay, roger.

The letters are unspelled and OKAY is not a word this language has. What makes it worth doing as a drill rather than a slide is that it sounds completely fine. It is friendly, it is quick, and everybody in the room will have understood it — which is precisely why week 7 argues that the harm of non-standard phraseology is invisible from inside a successful exchange.

Afterwards#

Your personal confusion list is the thing that leaves this session, and you keep it for the rest of the semester. It also feeds the first assessment: the readback drills in week 4 are marked partly on whether you have addressed the pairs you identified here.