English language training of pilots, air traffic controllers, flight attendant and management engineer focuses almost exclusively on improving their listening and speaking skills. Effective verbal communication is essential to ensuring safety in civil aviation. Communications are voice only, that is controllers and pilots talk to each other at a distance, through radio-telephony communications.
A certain degree of fluency is required because controllers have to communicate with several aircraft at the same time and they cannot wait for an unreasonably long time for a pilot to pass a message. Pilots need to receive information and instructions in good time to react accordingly. The interaction between pilots and controllers must be effective, as both parties need to be able to check, confirm and clarify when misunderstandings occur.
Controllers and pilots require should sufficient vocabulary to be able to communicate in both the routine and non-routine situations which may occur in their jobs. In addition, controllers and pilots need to have a good command of basic grammatical structures so that they can communicate information in a format which will be understood by their interlocutor. And finally, pronunciation needs to be sufficiently clear and intelligible to the international aviation community. These five features are the criteria that are tested in ICAO language proficiency scale.
To assist beginner aviators, this blog will focus on vocabulary enhancement in aviation English such as aviation technical terms, airplane parts and other basic knowledge that a novice aviation student should know. It is hoped that this blog will provide sufficient information and useful lessons to meet the purpose.
So aviators! Let’s get on board!
